Throw Me to the Wolves

by Patrick McGuinness

  There’s an excited, assenting buzz among the other reporters, so much so that they don’t even ask their own questions – just let Ellie draw him out. ‘If pupils are coming forward with these concerns now, and with reports of the rumours that were circulating about him in their time at school, surely it was the school’s duty to be aware of these matters at the right time and to have people in place to whom pupils could speak in confidence …’

  The Doc is out on his own now, and the school governors behind him, besuited barrister types and accountants with number-cruncher eyes, shuffle towards the edges of the picture. What they want to see is a rendition of Pontius Pilate, an institutional handwashing after which justice of whatever kind – legal, natural, or mob – can take its course somewhere far away from the playing fields and bank accounts of Chapelton College.

  The Doc wobbles: ‘All I can do is repeat that the school would never have stood for any improper conduct and would of course have acted at once on any allegations. The school invites the police to be in touch regarding any specifics we can help with, but Chapelton College and the governors received no complaints back then, and have not received any complaints recently of a historic nature. We continue to be a happy, thriving and high-performing school and I’d like to reiterate that Mr Wolphram was always a marginal figure on the staff, that he is not somebody Chapelton remembers with any sort of affection, and that he has had nothing to do with us for a long time …’

  There’s a clamour at the front for more detail, but the Doc cuts it short and raises his hand:

  ‘Thank you, that’s all I have to say … Once again, we extend our sympathies to the family of Zalie Dyer at this difficult time. Good evening and thank you.’

  The camera cuts to Ellie for the closing package. Her eyes are lit, fired like the rose window behind her. Journalistically, she has been blooded; she has the taste for it, for all of it: the hunt, the quarry, the kill, and now the delay that gives the kill its gratification:

  ‘That’s all for now from Chapelton College, but to many viewers, and certainly to the police and judiciary, this terrible murder has also shone a spotlight on a period in recent history – very recent history – when things seemed to happen differently: in broadcasting, in the media, in radio and TV, in schools and hospitals and politics, society tolerated behaviour that today would be unacceptable and even illegal. There will surely be calls, after the Zalie Dyer case has been closed, for a full investigation of the culture of abuse and bullying in our schools, and especially perhaps in our so-called elite schools. It was not so long ago after all. After the revelations about Jimmy Savile and others, and the opening of historical abuse cases around the country, is it time for a full inquiry into what happened in the schools that produced so many generations of the British Establishment?’

  ‘I like her,’ says Gary. ‘I’d swap her for Thicko or Small-Screen … we’d be solving crimes all over the city, sweating witnesses … plus she’d wrap Deskfish around her little finger.’

  ‘I just don’t buy it – I’m not ruling out that he killed someone – anyone can kill someone – but this stuff? Boys, puberty, sexual suggestions, touching them? No – either these pupils are lying – Jonny Kebab, for instance – or they’re confusing memories of different teachers. That’s possible, isn’t it? Anyway,’ I change the subject, ‘why d’you like her and not Lynne Forester? They’re not that different, are they?’

  Gary thinks about it. ‘I dunno, Prof, I guess I think she’s after the bigger picture and she goes about it with more class; Mad Lynne just wants dirt to sell …’

  The news has moved on to freezing temperatures in London, floods in Yorkshire, and the death of a quiz show host. The fatberg has gone now. Unless they find a body in it, the fatberg has had its fifteen minutes of fame.

  ‘Thirty-whatever years teaching there and that’s what you get,’ Gary says: ‘Cut loose in front of millions of people … It’s carte blanche to just go ahead and say any old shit.’

  Gary takes out his phone and swipes the touch screen to open Twitter. ‘Look!’ he says. It’s everywhere: hashtag Chapelton, hashtag Wolphram, hashtag Zalie, hashtag Justice, hashtag Monster, hashtag historic abuse, hashtag endless hashtags … He scrolls down the reams of comments and links, breathes in, shakes his head, closes his eyes, exhales dejectedly.

  ‘What do you see, Gary?’

  ‘What d’you think I see, Prof? It’s Twitter! I see a sordid hysterical zoo, that’s what I see, and now his old school’s sold him out it’s even worse …’

  ‘They were always going to do that, Gary – loyalty is exactly what the school can’t be seen to give. You can understand them, can’t you? Almost, I mean. And, anyway, you won’t get loyalty from Dr Monk. He always hated Mr Wolphram. The poison dwarf we called him. Not very original but you can see why. I’m sure you’d have come up with something better, Gary, with your gift for a good nickname, but we were kids and it fitted.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I’ll cut you some slack, Prof – looks like the classic sadist to me, if rather on the small side; pert little man; portable – you know, the travel version, fits in your overhead locker …’

  ‘Let me tell you about Doc Monk, Gary …’

  The Trial

  The Doc orders Danny to stand.

  ‘The accused is Daniel Patrick McAlinden, an Irish Catholic teenager from … oh yes: Newcastle.’ The Doc lingers over the from and inserts quotation marks around it with his fingers, tweezering it out of the sentence so it can be mocked. ‘A Republican sleeper who was welcomed into an English community and who is here with us at Chapelton College through the generosity of our benefactors. While the rest of you pay, Mr McAlinden is here because you pay. There’s always someone paying, isn’t there? And today Mr McAlinden will pay us all back a little of what he owes.’

  He laughs but nobody follows him. The Doc’s jokes are usually abstruse and self-involved anyway – the boys who want to laugh don’t know it’s a joke, the ones who know it’s a joke don’t find it funny. That’s what a lot of the Doc’s classes are like. Today, he senses that he doesn’t have the crowd with him, and this failure to connect makes him all the more vengeful. Even in front of everyone, winged and grounded and humiliated, Danny can still make the Doc look stupid.

  ‘First witness,’ Doc Monk calls out. He has put on his black university gown, from the Oxford college he refers to at least once every lesson. Danny, Ander, Gwil and Neil Hall play a game called Dickhead Bingo, where they cross out each word, each misty-eyed evocation, as the Doc mentions them: The Oxford Union, Punting, First Class Honours, The High, Balliol, My Old Tutor with whom I’m still in touch …

  Doc knows about Dickhead Bingo, too, since he confiscated Neil Hall’s home-made Bingo Card one day. He has to go easy on Neil, because Neil’s dad is a famous lawyer and old boy of the school.

  There’s never less hate and resentment and brutality in the world – it just sometimes seems that way through a trick of distribution. What this means at Chapelton College, here and now, is that there’s just more to take out on Danny and Ander, on Gwil and a few others. So today, Danny is being tried for all of them.

  ‘I’ll take the role of judge,’ the Doc tells Danny, ‘just to ensure balance and fairness …’

  He looks out at the class: there are not many hands up, not yet, because most of the boys are too shy to be the first into the spotlight. They’ll wait and see how this pans out, and take their turn when it’s safe.

  Lansdale is first, porn-vendor, entrepreneur-in-training, the latest in a long line of Lansdales at Chapelton College. His father and his grandfather and great-grandfather before him have owned Lansdale’s, one of the few independent department stores left in the country. Their shop is almost as old as the school, and one of their lines is the Chapelton uniform and sports kits. Everyone has to pass through Lansdale’s at some time or other. Because the school is split into different houses, and each house has its own tie and blazer badge, and each rung on the sc
hool’s hierarchy – house power, school prefect, head boy and deputy head boy – has its own tie and blazer badge, too, the clothing alone keeps the ground floor of Landsale’s abuzz with fittings. Some boys are so rich they have them tailor-made – you see them with their distracted mothers or their nannies outside the fitting rooms as the Lansdale’s staff fuss over them. Some boys have parents who wince at the cost of the blazers with their heavy badges, embossed with house or school or sports club crests, thick as the oil paint in a Van Gogh sunflower. Ander’s grandmother worked from photos of the school uniform to make his: for a month before leaving for school, he stood in her workroom as she measured him for a suit, two pairs of trousers and a blazer. To the blazer she stitched the heavy badge, and now, if anyone notices that Ander’s clothes aren’t from Lansdale’s or any of the school’s other ‘approved’ suppliers, they only notice because of the lining inside his jackets, which is rich and shimmering and pulses like a computer screen when he takes them off. Lansdale’s jackets and blazers look classy but they’re cheap on the inside. Danny McAlinden and Gwil Isaac had their uniforms paid for by their scholarships. ‘The clothes you’re wearing,’ the Doc tells them, ‘were bought by us.’

  The boys go to Lansdale’s on Saturday afternoons. They like the perfume and make-up department because they can ogle the salesgirls and dream of the sex behind those bored eyes.

  The boys, like the teachers, are in thrall to that great adolescent haunting that you think will pass but never really does; that instead just follows the curve of your ageing: the thought of all the sex being had elsewhere by others. But most of the boys don’t have the balls to look at the women face-on, and the women are used to being ogled, so the boys slink past them or pretend to be looking for gifts for their mothers or sisters. They invent processions of sisters so they can keep coming back. Ander loves the smell of the women – not the fresh perfume that blazes out of the vaporiser, but the weathered, mellow, skin-warmed scent that’s a few hours old, that has been lived in by a body and compressed behind clothes, mingled with sweat or cigarette smoke, and that turns him on because it’s so complex and individual. He’d lick the little gulf between the base of their necks and their collarbones because in his mind that’s where people’s smell is kept.

  Doc: ‘The accusation please, Mr Lansdale.’

  Lansdale: ‘He’s arrogant … thinks he knows every-thing.’ Lansdale has strutted his way to the front and puffed out his chest to speak. Only now, he realises he has nothing else to say and stands there dumb, rigid with embarrassment. He looks to the Doc to help him out.

  ‘Can you be more precise, Mr Lansdale? The court understands the accusation and doubtless sympathises, but requires some hard specifics – particulars – to process the information.’

  Lansdale thinks it over. Lewis puts up his hand, calls out, ‘Sir – please … I’ve …’

  The Doc cuts him off: ‘You’ll get your chance, Lewis, everyone in the courtroom will have their say …’ He turns again to Lansdale: ‘Continue.’

  They say that, with betrayal, it’s beginning that’s the hard bit. After that, it slides along nicely on its own – after you start, you become a function of it, rather than vice versa.

  That’s certainly how Lansdale makes it look:

  ‘He sits there, thinks he knows more than the teachers, answers the questions with irrelevant stuff. It’s just arrogant. He’s arrogant, he puts us all down, laughs at us behind out backs. Thinks he knows more than the teachers …’

  The Doc likes this. ‘These are certainly serious accusations,’ he says gravely, ‘and they’re of course hurtful and damaging to the school community, to the maintenance of respect and therefore to the delivery of sound teaching. It’s the ungratefulness, too, that irks, isn’t it? …’ He puts his head back, takes a breath, inhales a noseful of the air like a sommelier at a fine wine. His eyes are half closed. He’s happy. This is the peak of what he is and all he will ever be: a man who has reduced the world to the size of the classroom that he rules, and to the duration of the lesson where he is master. He’s trembling with contentment. It is as if he is being massaged from the inside – he might even be purring, though no one except Danny is close enough to hear. The Doc is exactly where he wants to be. He’s powerful, he’s in charge, and he has released a force that, for all its destructiveness, will remain his to control.

  ‘Go on,’ says the Doc in a tone of judicial dispassion copied from television. In the film of himself that plays in the Sunday matinee of his mind, he is a just but firm righter of wrongs. Solomon, maybe, or Rumpole of the Bailey. That, at any rate, is the metaphor Mr Wolphram will use later, when he apologises for the Doc’s actions and says sorry for arriving too late.

  There’s a cheer from the back, from the backrow bastards, as Mr Lawnder called them before he cracked up and left. In the film they’re all in, which has spread from the Doc’s mind to the class mind, they’ve got a taste for blood. But they’re in the right because the Doc says so. Danny is their quarry, and anything goes.

  ‘He laughs at you behind your back, sir. Says you’re …’

  ‘What, Lansdale, what? What does he say I am?’

  ‘He says you’re short, sir …’ Lansdale realises he needs to do better than this, because he has picked out one of the claims that is undeniably, undebatably true. He needs to recover or the prosecution is in trouble: ‘that you’ve got small-man syndrome, you’re ignorant … a snob, says you’re always going on about Balliol and Oxford and all the famous politicians you used to know from your pathetic – his word, Sir, pathetic – debating society at the Oxford Union who are now MPs and ministers and rich bankers and who can’t even remember you, while you’re …’

  Lansdale dries up – he hasn’t taken enough breath to get the whole sentence out so he stalls on the words and breathes in another lungful. Also, he’s afraid because he is getting to the bone, the marrow, of what makes the Doc the Doc.

  ‘While I’m what, Lansdale? While I’m what exactly?’ For a moment it’s hard to tell who exactly is on trial: Danny or Jonny Kebab.

  ‘While you’re here, Sir, while you’re here in your classroom teaching Latin verbs to bored children and checking the contents of …’ he looks around for help and there is no help, ‘of boys’ pants … his words, Sir, not mine, that’s what he says.’

  Jonny Kebab looks tragic up there – he looks like he’s the accused, and he squirms and sweats like a paid witness breaking down in a courtroom drama. He’s a scared, dishonest boy, but he’s not, or not mainly, evil; not deliberately interested in causing harm to others. He’s just in it for himself, and he does what is expected of him by whoever holds the power or the purse. It’s not complicated. And, anyway, thinks Ander, after studying history for a couple of terms, who any longer thinks human beings are complicated? Certainly not us. Not me. Maybe Jonny Kebab is even sorry that he’s got Danny into this trouble, because Jonny doesn’t really do bullying, he just does self-preservation. If it hurts him to help you, he won’t. If it doesn’t, he will. Morally, he is the bubble in the centre of the spirit level. He is complete neutrality. Until he’s under threat, or feels afraid, or is up in front of everyone and needs to find someone to take his place on the scaffold. People make armies and religions and economies out of the likes of Jonny Kebab.

  He also knows that Danny won’t hold it against him, that Danny is clever enough to know that Jonny has no choice, and kind enough not to look for reasons – beyond the Doc’s malice – for what is about to happen. Jonny is … as he’ll say later to anyone who’ll listen … as much of a victim in all this as McAlinden … Even in betrayal Jonny is an entrepreneur, finds ways of rebranding his cowardice as victimhood and finding new markets for it.

  Doc Monk walks up to Lansdale, and begins, as he puts it, the ‘cross-examination’.

  ‘These are all serious accusations, and the defendant will have the chance later on to respond to them. But there are other charges, more serious still, and these c
onstitute the reason we are all here.’

  Nobody knows where this is going. They knew it would be bad, of course it would, but they didn’t know the turn it would take.

  The Doc begins: ‘Mr Lansdale, did you, at any point following the terrorist murder in Brighton last October, just a few miles from where we’re sitting today, hear McAlinden expressing sympathy for the bombers?’

  Jonny thought it was over but it’s not. He wasn’t ready for this. This is different. It’s now not just a joke that got out of hand, the kind of thing you can look back on and say went too far, sprinkle a bit of regret over and then move on. This is a different agenda, and it comes from a place in the world that lies outside the school walls, a place where people get killed and maimed and blown up.

  When Ander thinks about it later he likens it in his mind to a child finding that his toy gun has suddenly been turned into a real one.

  ‘What do you mean, Sir?’ Jonny asks helplessly. His grasp on current affairs is no firmer than on past ones. You can see him computing, in his messy mind, the fragments of news that reached him through radio headlines or overheard conversations. He tries to sort the political stuff from the football results, from the showbiz gossip and the various natural disasters in unpronounceable places across the globe. He remembers the school assembly and the minute’s silence and he thinks he’s got it. The Bombing. Yes. The IRA. Brighton. October. November maybe. The hotel, the injured stretchered out. The fury in the headlines. The graffiti on the bus stop by the bridge: IRISH OUT. INTERMENT [sic] NOW. The graffiti outside his dad’s department store one morning: HANG IRISH SCUM. They’d had to scrub that off before the shoppers arrived.