‘That figures,’ she said, her grin turning down at the ends. ‘And is there some dark secret you’ve not so far revealed to me about the value of Eng. lit. in your future life? Or are you just into poetry and stuff?’
‘It interests me.’
‘It interests me too, but that’s no reason for staking your future on it. You’d be better off doing something useful.’
‘Isn’t literature useful, miz?’
‘No. Not like physics or chemistry or maths or medicine. The world needs people who know about things like that. Poets it might manage without.’
‘I’m not sure about that.’
‘Let’s not argue the point.’
An unforthcoming silence seemed the best reply.
Her eyes narrowed. ‘You’re not thinking of becoming a teacher, are you?’
‘No, miz.’
Evident relief. She grinned widely. ‘Thank God for that. Tell me, then,’ she went on with forced professional interest, ‘what do you hope to do with yourself? And don’t get excited, I only mean careerwise.’
‘Careerwise, miz?’
The semantic point evaded her. Or she pretended it did. ‘For a job,’ she said with heavy tolerance.
I affected rumination. ‘I don’t know.’
An as-I-expected nod. ‘You don’t know!’
‘Not sure.’
‘Not sure!’ Another rough going-over with her cold green eyes. She hitched in her chair, settling herself with her bare elbows sharp as marlin spikes on the desk.
‘Let me tell you something, Robinson.’
Clearly the news was not going to be happy. ‘What, miz?’
‘You are wet.’
This did wonders for my depression.
Nor had she finished. ‘Eng. lit. is just about your size. I expect you still weep over poetry.’ She scratched an armpit. Somehow an appropriate reflex, I thought. ‘I’ve been keeping tabs on you this last year,’ she said, tapping my file. ‘You’ve sloped around being useless most of the time. You don’t like games, you’ve hidden yourself away in the library whenever there was a vague chance you might get roped into house competitions. You’re antisocial. You’ve no initiative, no go at all. About all you’re good for as far as I can see is making smart-alec speeches at the Debating Soc. and writing twitty stuff for the school mag.’
A repeat performance of my unforthcoming silence seemed only further provocation.
‘What Mr Osborn sees in you I can’t imagine. Well, if he wants you he can have you. But don’t expect me to send up a favourable recommendation. In my estimation what you should have is a douche of cold reality. You need to find out what life is all about. A job would do wonders for you. Certainly, in my estimation the school won’t benefit from having you hanging about in it for another two years. There are better ways of spending the taxpayers’ money.’
I waited a minute to be sure she had finished and to give myself time to calm down. She had; I didn’t.
‘Is that all, miz?’
‘You want more?’ Her tight python grin returned. ‘Masochist. You’re like all the arty lot.’
The end-of-afternoon bell rang. Ms Tyke shuffled the few papers of my life together and closed the file. Stood up. Dropped the file into its drawer. Slammed the drawer.
‘Okay,’ she said, standing by the desk swinging her car keys from a finger. ‘Come see me again if you change your mind.’
I went and stared at the sea.
22/‘The sea is rather fine, don’t you think?’
She was sitting behind me on the low wall that separates the beach from the esplanade just below Chalkwell station. I turned and saw small feet with painted toenails, slim legs in hugging blue jeans, a red T-shirt tight over unobtrusive breasts, a small triangular face, short cropped blonde hair. She stretched out ‘rather’ in a way that betrayed she was not English, like it was an elastic band.
I nodded. Turned back to the sea.
She slipped down onto the sand beside me.
‘You don’t mind I should talk to you I hope?’
Usually I don’t like talking to strangers: the inconsequential polite natter of the unattached. But sometimes, like now, when people you know have given you a pain in the mindgut, it is a relief to come across someone you don’t know who wants to talk. Wants to prattle about nothing. Inconsequentiality then is even comforting.
‘Talk away,’ I said.
‘It is for my English,’ she said, raised her eyebrows—pretty eyebrows, brown, like a pencil line—and nodded her head from side to side. ‘I am rather rusty.’
‘You’re doing very well.’
‘You think so?’ She smiled widely. ‘I am pleased. I only arrived two—three days ago.’
‘Where are you from?’
‘Norway. My name is Kari.’
‘Hello, Kari. I’m Hal.’
She shook hands, a comic formality sitting on seaside sand.
‘Hal?’
‘Short for Henry. I don’t like Henry.’
‘Hal is nice. I like it very much.’ She elasticated ‘very’ also. ‘Southend I like too,’ she said smiling approval at the Thames and settling herself comfortably. ‘It is quite jolly.’
‘You’ve been to England before?’
‘Once. That time at Birmingham.’ She pulled a bad-smell face. ‘Birmingham is not so jolly as Southend.’ We laughed. ‘I think I shall sun bath if you don’t mind.’
‘Be my guest,’ I said. ‘And it’s sunbathe.’
She cross-arm gathered the hem of her T-shirt in her hands and hauled upwards. ‘Sunbathe,’ she said, pulling the shirt over her head. ‘Thank you. Please correct my wrong speech. I learn best that way.’
‘You’re doing great,’ I said assessing her litheness, the small breasts scarfed in a haltered slip of red cloth, her sleek tanned skin.
In a neatly flicking unzipping movement she sloughed her jeans. A daring nappy of cloth curtained her crotch and arrowed the eye down the flow of her trim legs.
I needed to swallow a lot.
‘Wouldn’t you like to sunbathe too?’ She lay back flat on the sand, pillowing her head on her bundled clothes. ‘You must be hot in your clotheses.’
‘Clothes,’ I said, just managing.
‘Silly me,’ she said, chuckling. ‘Always, I get that wrongly.’
I looked at my watch. ‘I have to meet someone soon.’
She was staring at me too frankly for comfort. ‘Someone rather nice I think.’
‘A friend. He might give me a holiday job.’
‘Then he must be a rather good friend.’
‘I’m not sure,’ I said.
But for some reason just saying that lightened my glooms. And her verbal tick, elasticating her rathers and verys, was not only funny and sexy, but reminded me of Barry. He had a verbal tick too. His tongue seems—seems—seemed, dammit, seemed; it doesn’t any more—seemed to go to the side of his mouth instead of to the front when he said sibilants. It wasn’t a lisp, but produced an unusual emphasis to his speech, a sexy articulation and movement of the mouth. Just remembering this pushed out of my mind any more sulking about the telephone call, or Ms Tyke, or about drunks visited in the night. The drunk would have gone home. I was still here. B. had just been going on the way he had been going on before we met, hadn’t he? Now we’d get together and it would be different, wouldn’t it? We’d be a team, a pair; he had said so himself. If I had gone in with him last night, he wouldn’t have gone back to The Drunk. It was my fault for deserting him when he wanted me to stay with him. I’d not make that mistake again.
What’s more, as these thoughts echoed in my head, having Kari lying right there next to me near-naked in the sun made me want to be with him. It was him I wanted lying next to me in the sun.
I got up. Brushed sand from myself.
‘Maybe we meet again? I hope we do,’ Kari said.
‘I’d like that,’ I said, not expecting that we would.
‘I am an au pair, you know
. At the house painted pink in Chalkwell Avenue. You have seen it? Near the railway bridge? Or perhaps you do not live here?’
‘I live here and I know the house. You’ll be around quite a time then.’
She stood up. As sliver as a whistle. ‘Six months. More I think it might be. If I get along okay with my people. They are rather nice. I think it will be all right.’
‘Well, I come here quite often.’
‘I’ll watch for you.’
Walking away half turned I palmed a salute. ‘See you, then.’
23/ACTION REPLAY
I turn and look at her.
She is looking at me.
I turn away.
She slips off the wall and sits beside me, close.
I look at her.
She looks at me.
We both look at the sea.
I look at her.
She looks at me.
She undresses and I am watching.
We are looking at each other.
I am thinking about Barry.
I get up, looking at her.
She gets up, looking at me.
I walk away, looking at her.
She waves, looking at me.
I turn away, not expecting to see her again.
Which shows how wrong I can be.
JKA. Running Report: Henry Spurling ROBINSON 22nd Sept. 1015. Meeting with Mr J. Osborn, Head of English, Chalkwell High.
The school secretary showed me into a small darkish room where Mr Osborn was already waiting. The room was chill, even though the sun was shining outside. Mr Osborn indicated a chair on the other side of the table. We engaged in routine greetings.
Mr Osborn is the kind of teacher who makes me feel thirteen again. He has a precise manner, and piercing, slightly crossed brown eyes that glare through thick-lensed glasses. His speech is clipped and sharply pronounced. He often rolls and rasps his ‘r’ sounds.
Mr O. had already made it clear during our initial telephone conversation when I arranged this meeting that he had nothing to tell me and regarded the meeting as a waste of time. He began by repeating this. He asked why I thought he could be of any use. I said that I understood he knew Hal well. He asked what made me think so. I replied that Hal and his parents had said things that led me to this conclusion.
Mr O. said it was true he had helped the Robinsons, but he would not claim to know Hal well. I said I was beginning to think that no one knew him well, and explained that what I wanted to know was what had gone on between Hal and Barry Gorman that caused Hal to damage Gorman’s grave.
Mr O. paused for a moment. He then told me he had little time for social workers. He mistrusted their motives, ‘and often their intelligence’. I said that whatever his views about social workers might be, the court had charged me with the responsibility for discovering what had happened in this case and of making recommendations about Hal’s future. Mr O. said that none of this had anything to do with him; it was Robinson I should be talking to. I said I had been trying but that Hal would not say anything about his friend’s death or the subsequent events, but that things he had said led me to believe that Mr O. might know at least some of the story.
‘Let us suppose,’ Mr O. said in a very schoolmasterly way, ‘that I do know. I would regard such information as confidential.’ He added very acidly, ‘I assume you have heard of professional confidentiality.’ I said I needed no reminding, that professional confidentiality was a part of my job. He said that in his opinion this was not just the prerogative of priests and doctors, and even social workers, but that it extended to teachers too.
I tried to assure Mr O. that anything he told me would remain confidential. He replied that I had missed the point. A confidence did not remain a confidence, he said, just because you told it to someone else who was bound by professional confidentiality. In any case, he went on, he was not stupid enough to suppose that anything he told me would not find its way into a file somewhere, if not onto a computer. Wasn’t this what social workers did—keep files on people? How else could they compile their reports?
I said that, naturally, we had to keep files. But that they were not available to anyone except those social workers involved in a case. That, said Mr O., meant they were available to anyone determined enough to get the information he wanted. No file was ever completely secure; surely I understood that!
I could see no point in continuing with this discussion. I began to suspect that Mr O. likes an argument for the sake of argument, and began to see, too, where some of Hal’s habits have come from. I said that I understood Mr O.’s position; but what was his opinion of Hal? How clever was he?
Clever enough to stay on in the Sixth and go to university afterwards, Mr O. replied. I made a show of writing this in my notebook.
Did he think Hal was still disturbed by Gorman’s death? Of course, Mr O. said; Gorman and Robinson had been close friends for some weeks, everyone knew that. Naturally, the boy was upset and shocked. What Hal needed was to regain his self-confidence—or maybe to find it for the first time in his life. In Mr O.’s view, this would happen if Robinson was got back to school as soon as possible and helped to apply himself to subjects and activities that deeply interested him.
Did Mr O. feel that literature deeply interested Hal?
Ideas deeply interested him, Mr O. said. And Hal happens to discover their best expression in literature.
I asked whether it was literature they had discussed during Mr O.’s regular meetings with Hal over the last few weeks. Yes, he said, but their meetings were no substitute for a full-time course of study and the companionship of his peers.
I said that I tended to agree, but that there was a problem. Only a problem of bureaucracy, nothing else, Mr O. said. I said it was a little more difficult than that. Hal is charged with a crime, and one the court finds hard to understand and which offends public decency. I would like to try and explain this in my report, and to make recommendations that are sensible in the light of the facts. But that I cannot do this if I cannot find out what has happened. Robinson won’t talk about it at all, and the only other person who seems to know, I said firmly, seems to be you. Now you say you won’t help me either.
Mr O. thought about this for a while. I reminded him that the case comes before the court again next week. If I knew no more by then I shall have to submit a report saying that Hal will not cooperate. The court will then, probably, decide that Hal should be sent to a Detention Centre where he can be examined by psychiatrists and the police as well as the social services more easily.
Mr O. became quite angry. He said such a course of action would be a disaster, a crime in itself. I told him neither I nor the court would have any option. Under the law there is little else that can be done. The offence must be dealt with, and in the absence of further information to explain it, the only thing the court can do in the end is punish the offender for the crime committed.
Mr O. sat stiffly in his chair glaring at me. Nothing was said for a few moments. Then Mr O. said that in his opinion it was extremely important that Hal himself explain what had happened. He felt that Hal was brooding on it all, and that this was bad for him, and might have worse long term effects than any treatment the court might impose on him. But also, he felt it important that Hal’s trust in him be kept intact. By telling me what he knew, Mr O. would break that trust, and he would only do this with the greatest reluctance.
I agreed with all he said. In that case, Mr O. said, he would suggest a course of action. He would do all he could to persuade Hal to tell me what had happened, if I would agree to recommend to the court that Hal should be allowed to come back to school, whatever other treatment was also felt necessary.
I said I could not make deals. He laughed at this, and said I was talking like a second rate television crime story. But, I went on, I did think it was in Hal’s best interest to keep him out of a Detention Centre, and that his future might be best served by staying on at school, if that is what he wanted. If he did, and the
re was nothing in what he had to tell that might lead to further criminal proceedings, then I would probably recommend either a conditional discharge or a Supervision Order.
This would mean that Hal would be kept an eye on for a while and helped if he needed it, but would not be required to go through any further official investigation. However, I added as firmly as I could, I would need support from someone responsible who knows Hal if I am to succeed in making such a recommendation. Would you, I asked Mr O., give that support and appear in court on Hal’s behalf, if necessary?
Mr O. said that of course he would.
We agreed therefore that Mr O. would see Hal and try to persuade him to tell me his story, and that Mr O. and I would meet again next Tuesday to review the matter. By then I hoped Mr O.’s influence would have worked.
24/By the time I got there, it was after five-thirty and the shop was closed. Mrs Gorman had gone home; but Barry was in full view of the window pretending to arrange a sleeve display.
He let me in, all overdone brightness, and locked the door behind us.
‘Listen, about last night . . .’
He told me the story. I couldn’t raise much enthusiasm. He noticed; but the harder he tried, the less I could respond.
‘You don’t have to explain,’ I said at last. ‘I mean, it hasn’t anything to do with me, has it?’
I hated all this jiving about; but still his presence fingered me pliant, as it always did no matter how I felt or what he had done. Just the sight of him was enough. (Always? Till once, ending always. When he spiked resistance, rage.)
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘We’ll forget it. Now . . . close your eyes. It’s surprise time!’
‘What are you up to?’
‘Do as you’re told! Come on, close your eyes.’
Laughing, I blinded myself. I heard him scrabbling about behind the counter.
‘Quick,’ I said, ‘stop faffing about!’
‘All right . . . nearly ready . . . Now. Open up!’
He was holding out close to me at eye level a shining red crash helmet. Visored and flash and gladiatorial.
‘Voilà! Pour broom-broom!’
I stared, unmoving.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘Take it. It’s yours. Go on. Try it!’
Dance on My Grave Page 10