Move

by Conor Kostick

  ‘Does anyone know where Michael Clarke is?’ asked Miss Nolan.

  Zed put up his hand and I looked at him curiously. What was he going to say? Was he going to make up an outrageous story?

  ‘Yes, Zimraan?’

  ‘He’s in the cupboard, miss.’

  I couldn’t help but start sniggering at the brazen cheek of my comrade. There were a few other giggles too and those who didn’t know what had happened in the lunch break now looked up with amazement.

  Miss Nolan turned around slowly to stare at the cupboard. Poor Michael, what was he thinking? My sniggering got worse and it set Deano off. The more we tried to fight it, the more the tears came.

  ‘Michael Clarke, are you in there?’

  Silence, a palpable, fecund, wonderful silence. All eyes were focused on that little cupboard in which Michael was suffering. We were chortling aloud now, at the back of the class, and that was getting the others going. Part of the emotion fuelling our giggles was extreme nervousness. Miss Nolan would see that he’d been locked in from the outside and she could very easily turn on us, the perpetrators.

  With a heavy sigh she got up, unlatched the door and pulled it wide open.

  Michael didn’t dare look at her but put his legs out first, and then struggled up onto his feet, head bowed. She regarded him with dismay, before shaking her head.

  ‘Go back to your desk.’

  It was impossible to contain ourselves any longer and the laughter rang out until exhausted and gasping for breath, we laid our heads on our desks, spent. Tara was furious with us, I know. And of course, with hindsight, I’m not proud of creating such a painful moment for Michael. Mind you, it was funny: the whole class looking at that silent cupboard where we knew Michael was trying his hardest to disappear.

  Anyway, there are a hundred stories like that one. The point is I could get away with anything. You can see as well, that my new powers didn’t make me a better person. More confident, bold, reckless even, yes, but kind? Unfortunately not.

  ***

  Rather more serious was my campaign against Mr Kenny. At least that was justifiable. What I didn’t like about Mr Kenny was the way he made fun of us at swimming. I get angry even now, when I remember how he would humiliate the boys. He would shout at us across the pool.

  ‘When are you going to get hairs on your chest, Liam O’Dwyer? Don’t you know you are descended from apes?’

  I never really got the point of that remark, though he thought it was clever enough to keep bellowing it out, pretty much every week. The girls were pathetic. They would go along with him, laughing nervously each time he shouted. We were fifteen or sixteen then and even for me, who could move, there were moments of introspection, doubt and uncertainty. When I was in my swimming shorts I felt vulnerable. Anyone would squirm at such an open, public, half-reference to puberty. Mr Kenny knew it too. That’s why he kept it up.

  Another cause of our dislike of him was his English class. These days I don’t mind reading the famous works of literature; they are generally pretty good. But I refuse to look again at Romeo and Juliet or The Lord of the Flies. I’d never be able to get Mr Kenny’s dramatic reading voice out of my head, with its emphases on all the wrong words.

  Worse still was his entirely inappropriate crush on Jane Curtis. There was this after-school, drama-class routine. I should have realised sooner, given that the stupid play we worked on, but never performed to anyone, was about two cynical teachers and their suppressed desire for a beautiful pupil. He was cultivating Jane, who was flattered at first but then told me she thought his attentions were going too far, ringing her at home, for example. It all adds up and, while I know Tara disapproves and I probably have taken on a lot of bad karma, I’m glad I got to him in the end. It helped that he had jowls like those of a dog, which he rather pitifully tried to hide under a beard.

  With the backup of the boys, I tortured Mr Kenny by barking down the corridor at him, and then running away, before he could see who was doing it. If I hadn’t been able to move, he would have caught me a hundred times. Each time he did see me, I just moved to a nearby universe where he hadn’t quite been quick enough. As a result, we were in a universe where he’d been driven crazy by my antics.

  If I saw him on the stairs: woof, woof! Entering the staff room: woof, woof! Crossing the courtyard: woof, woof! Then I’d drop down below the window. Some weeks he would ignore it; other weeks he would roar with anger and run full pelt for the corner, only to see my heels as I shot out of sight down the far end of a corridor.

  For his birthday I left a present on his desk. His chest stuck out with pleasure when he saw the colourful ‘Happy Birthday’ wrapping. I almost regretted what I had done; he was so touched that his class had gone to the trouble of demonstrating their affections. When he tore away the paper to find a can of dog food, Zed and I sniggered. To his credit, Mr Kenny took the joke relatively well. Those jowls only wobbled a bit in dismay as he attempted a smile.

  After a while, it seemed like the whole school was in on the barking. The headmaster even spoke about it at assembly and said that if anyone was caught making barking sounds in the school they would be in very serious trouble. That calmed things down for most, but not for me. I just kept on barking at him. Shrill little barks, big deep woofs. Whatever mood I was in, I’d let him have it with relish, remembering his own humiliating shouts at the swimming pool.

  They never caught me. Well, in some universes they did, but those are inhabited by other versions of me. I moved to this one, the one where I finally let him see me, fair and square, near the end of term at the top of the stairs.

  ‘Woof!’ I barked angrily, arms folded.

  ‘Aha, Liam O’Dwyer, I knew it was you! I have you at last.’

  He ran up the stairs and followed me into the classroom, where I had taken my seat at the back.

  ‘Liam O’Dwyer, you know what the headmaster said about barking in school. I look forward to hearing what your father says when he learns of the trouble you are in.’

  ‘Sir, take me to the headmaster right now. Cane my hand if you like, but please, don’t bring my father into it. You don’t know what he’s like.’

  ‘Liam O’Dwyer, you have been behind the worst breach of discipline, the most sustained campaign of miscreancy I have ever known in all my time as a teacher. Of course your father must be informed.’

  ‘Sir, no. Please, you don’t understand. He’ll kill me.’ My voice trembled. ‘Please, sir. Have a heart.’

  ‘My mind is made up.’ Mr Kenny slapped his books down firmly on the desk. ‘There is no excuse for your behaviour this term. I shall ring your father this very evening.’

  ‘Is there nothing I can say to make you change your mind?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  He sat down and with a very serious expression began to leaf through The Lord of the Flies. ‘Now turn to page eighty-four.’

  I got up, climbed up onto the window ledge and lowered the top window. It squeaked and everyone looked at me.

  ‘Liam O’Dwyer, get down from there at once!’

  ‘I’m sorry, but my life is worth nothing once my father hears from you.’

  Our classroom was on the second floor; the drop was a fatal one.

  ‘Get down.’ His voice was deliberately tired. ‘You are a second-rate actor and you don’t fool anyone.’

  He was right. But still.

  ‘I’m sorry you don’t believe me.’ And I jumped out, arms flailing extravagantly.

  ‘Arrrrgh, Nooo!’ Mr Kenny leapt up. I could hear the clatter of his desk, flung to the side as he raced across the room and the further crashing of his frantic progress through the class. Then he was above me, staring down from the window, wide-eyed. I looked back up at him and smiled, before straightening up.

  There was a small window ledge, which I had been crouched on. It was a bit risky to throw myself out so dramatically, but I reckoned that if something had gone wrong, in the second or two it took me to fall, I could
move to a universe where I didn’t crash into the playground paving.

  ‘You boy,’ he stood, white, trembling all over, ‘are a disturbed child and a menace.’

  As I climbed back in, Zed gave me the thumbs-up.

  ‘Deadly, Liam. The best ever, really.’

  That night Mr Kenny rang my dad for a long chat, but we were ready. For someone from an Asian family background, Zed can do an amazingly convincing impersonation of my dad, northside Dublin accent and all. He and I were sitting there playing Gran Turismo, the volume down of course. Zed had the phone cradled on his shoulder. Every now and again he would say, ‘terrible sorry, Mr Kenny, terrible sorry,’ or, ‘the little f…, the little eejit.’ Zed finished it off by sounding really angry, ‘Jaysus! You can be sure that won’t be happening again. Wait till I see the little … Well. You can be sure.’

  After that window incident, Mr Kenny never again shouted at me during swimming; he really did think I was a little mad.

  4

  Girls

  I am getting around to Tara. But first, reluctantly, I had better say something about girls. Naturally, being a sixteen-year-old boy I had a great desire for girls, but unusually for that age, because I could move, I also had a lot of scores. I’ll spare you the details since they are sleazy, I’ll admit, but chasing girls did teach me something about other people’s behaviour and moving.

  When I search for other options to a physical event, or an event involving me, that’s easy. At every moment there are thousands of alternatives, far too many for me to comprehend them all before they fall away, time moving onwards. But the number of options that involve other people changing their actions is much narrower. I can’t move to a universe where anything goes. People behave in a manner that is more or less true to their character across all the universes.

  What I discovered, though, was that our friends’ characters were not always what they seemed. For example, there was a girl in our class called Hazel Cartwright. She was very proper, very aloof. She did ballet after school and scorned the rough side of the class. There was no way she would show the slightest interest in me. Except that, during one very dull geography lesson, I started to daydream and explore some of the more unusual alternate universes. Once I had started to look in all seriousness, I was amazed at the options involving her. There was one where all I had to do was come up to her during a lunch break when we were the only people in the classroom. In my hand I held the key to the storeroom at the back of 4D.

  ‘What’s that?’ she asked.

  I told her.

  ‘Why are you showing me?’

  ‘Come with me now, and we’ll have thirty minutes together, in the dark.’

  She said nothing more, but followed.

  Then there was Jocelyn Doonan who all the boys fancied, some of the girls too. She was cool about it, not showy, just natural, and modest. She had wonderful black curly hair that she would hold to the side when she leant over her desk. Most of the time she wasn’t interested in me, although for a while it was all I did, search around fruitlessly for universes in which I got together with Jocelyn.

  There was a big dance for Debbie Healy’s birthday at the community hall in Tolka Park. Tara wasn’t there, but all the trendier people in the class were. For some really strange reason, Jocelyn was in a totally wild humour. I don’t know what had happened to her, but when I sought among the nearby universes there were an amazing number of them in which Jocelyn was with me. Then I realised there were even more that didn’t concern me, but where she was with another boy. In fact, it would have been possible for every one of the boys in the hall that night, without exception, to score Jocelyn. It was during the slow songs I could see that most clearly. All the adjacent universes showed her with a variety of boys. If they’d started kissing her, had steered her towards a dark corner, she’d have stayed with them.

  At the time I was delighted that I could see this before any of my rivals. But, looking back, I feel a little sad. Whatever it was that put her in such a mood was not good. My ability to move is very limited in some ways. But if I had searched, I might have found a universe where she talked to me about what had happened. I feel all protective thinking about it now, when it’s too late. I can’t move to universes that have branched away from turning points that are far back in time; in fact, a few minutes is my limit.

  Sixteen-year-old boys are quick to boast to each other about their conquests. A lot of it is just desperation, not to be left behind, not to be thought a failure at something far more important than exams or sports. With me, though, I didn’t boast at all. I never said anything about any girl, until now, writing this down. It would be good to say this was because of my respect for the girls that I was with, but since I’m being honest, science demanding such honesty, I’ll admit my discretion came about because I very quickly learned something by watching the consequences of bragging.

  Even if you only tell your best mate, the word gets around and girls simply will not go with you. That’s how it was for Zed. If he wanted to score, he had to go to events involving girls from St Theresa’s, because our girls had closed ranks against him. Girls don’t want to get together with someone who is going to boast about it, not just because they don’t want to be a conquest, but because they want to enjoy themselves discreetly, without ending up with a reputation.

  ***

  After a while, I began to notice Tara. Despite that terrible day on the barge, it was easy to overlook Tara. After all, she was very quiet. As I’ve already said, around that time I had been given to speculating on different girls, testing the possibilities. One day I concentrated on her. I had become tired of the ‘beautiful’ girls, the ones who spent hours upon hours concerned with their looks. The strange thing is, with the possible exception of Jocelyn, the more beautiful the girl, the more obsessed she was that she could have higher cheekbones, or more voluptuous lips, or something along those lines. I saw the other boys feverishly chasing such narcissistic girls and I was slightly contemptuous of them.

  One slow school afternoon, I was examining the girls in the class with this new perspective and I thought of Tara. Tara keeps her hair long, in most universes anyway. As it is red, watching her you sometimes get caught in breathtaking moments where you want to be an artist and put her in a painting. Simple moments, like when her hair gathers at the shoulder, then cascades as she leans over to adjust the straps on her false foot, or when she smiles. She doesn’t smile often enough.

  What about the fact she had only one foot? Of course, you say, what difference does it make? Today I’d agree with you. It makes none. You get so used to her limp; you’d miss it if it were gone. To some extent, it’s part of her character now. Back then, though, the lads were ashamed to fancy Tara and, if you said that you did, you’d get a slagging for being creepy, like you had a fetish. Not that I cared about their slagging. I was a lot older than them when it came to girls.

  In any case, while I was scrutinising her pattern of possible behaviours, I discovered a really extraordinary quality in Tara, which was that it was very difficult to find a universe where she did a mean or selfish act. Universe upon universe, in their tens of thousands, branching away to infinity, and in nearly all the ones I looked into, they carried her onwards, a genuinely kind and caring human being. Can you see why I was impressed? What had begun as a rather flirtatious daydreaming suddenly became a fascinating and serious challenge.

  One dinnertime I went up to her and asked her out.

  ‘Liam O’Dwyer, I think you are selfish, arrogant, cruel and vain. I wouldn’t go out with you in a million years.’

  That didn’t work, so I moved to one where I hadn’t left my table and been turned down. Of course I looked around for a universe where she had answered, ‘Why, Liam, I’d be delighted.’ But it didn’t exist. In fact, I got the same answer everywhere, with minor variations: lazy, uncaring, heartless. The best I could do was find a universe in which a fire alarm went off just after I’d spoken to her, so that I c
ouldn’t hear her reply. This was frustrating, but it was also interesting: a challenge.

  Watching Tara having to stay in the classroom on Wednesday afternoons when we go for P.E. was usually a slightly sad moment, because it reminded everyone of the accident. One Wednesday, I arranged to be excused from P.E. and spent the time with her. I was on my best behaviour, displaying my sensitive side and thought we got on fairly well. So the next day I asked her out again.

  ‘Liam O’Dwyer, I think you are selfish, arrogant, cruel, vain,’ she paused for a moment, ‘and manipulative. I wouldn’t go out with you in a million years.’

  Busted. This wasn’t going to be easy.

  Over the weekend I contemplated various schemes to get her interested in me: fires in which I would be her rescuer; swimming accidents, ditto. It was pathetic really, so I gave up. But I kept my attention on her and the more I saw her steady, true, path through time, the more I knew I wanted to go out with her. What had begun as a challenge was becoming something powerful and out of my control.

  It really is hard to explain, but she is almost unique among all the people I know. For example, one hot afternoon in class, her desk was falling shut, just as she noticed a fly landing on the rim. To save the fly, she had to put her hand out, scaring it away and getting a painful blow on her knuckles. It was a tiny thing, but I had to laugh. She literally would not hurt a fly, not in any of the hundreds of nearby universes in which the same incident took place. Similarly, I’d listen in to her conversations, and then search nearby universes for a spiteful comment or a jealous one. Never. No one else stands up to such scrutiny, especially me.