Throw Me to the Wolves

by Patrick McGuinness

  Now Mr Wolphram’s arrival breaks the illusion. They were having a good time but now it’s no longer a game and here they are, stuck on the wrong side of the rules.

  The Doc still has his hand on the huge Oxford Latin Dictionary, a clothbound blue slab the size of a child, that he slammed down on the desk to mimic the sound of the bullet to the head in his kangaroo court.

  They’re too late for the mock-execution.

  What happens next Ander will remember for the rest of his life, and, unlike many important events in a life, it won’t accrue extra detail with every telling (who would he tell anyway?) or fade away like a photograph left in sunlight. It stays clean-edged and bright; complete and squared-off in its frame of retrospect:

  Mr Wolphram roars. It’s a great, deep, rolling cry of fury. Maybe also pain. Ander can’t quite tell because the fury comes in over and around it, but, yes, maybe some pain, too. Ander is attuned to that Möbius strip of anger and sorrow, fury and pain. Wolphram’s roar seems to suck the air out of the room, out of everyone in the room. The Doc jumps; they all jump. In a moment Wolphram has taken the hood off Danny and brought him back up to his feet. It’s now that Ander sees what they hadn’t seen before: Danny’s hands are tied behind his back with his own tie; tightly, it’s true, though it’s more for symbolism than for physical restraint. It’s an extra humiliation, and for the Doc it’s another detail to get off to. Mr Wolphram tries to unbind Danny’s wrists but the tie is so tightly knotted that he needs to drag it over his hands and knuckles to get it off, rippling his skin and leaving his wrists white where the blood flow has been cut off.

  Vaughan and Lewis have already gone, the crowd control at the front has disappeared, Rich Nicholson and Gwil and Neil Hall have sat back down. Only the Doc is still in place. The dictionary holds him up, gives him ballast.

  Mr Wolphram takes Danny by the elbow and leads him out of the room. To the Doc, he says slowly, enunciating every syllable: ‘You are a poisonous child hiding inside a man: a vicious, evil little coward.’

  The Doc cannot lose face in front of his class, but he looks stupid in his gown and the boys have already sensed that the room’s balance of power has changed.

  He opens his mouth to speak and his voice trembles and breaks: ‘I will deal with discipline in my classroom as I see fit. I don’t come barging into your class and tell you what to do. You have no—’

  But Mr Wolphram has gone, taking Danny with him. The Doc keeps going anyway. He has to keep face, say his piece, make his stand:

  ‘—right to question my judgement. This is my classroom and these are my rules.’ He bangs his hand on the desk and looks around, but no one meets his eye. People are starting to leave though the lesson is not over – Ander and Neil, Nicholson, Gwil Isaac are all going. The Doc doesn’t challenge them. Even Lansdale and the class cattle are moving off.

  Also, the black velvet hood is gone.

  They find out later that Mr Wolphram has taken Danny to the headmaster, who will do nothing. At first, he assures them both that the episode (that’s what he calls it, an episode) will be ‘looked into’. Then he adds that depressing rider we all remember from school, when one person is being bullied and the other is bullying them, and the teacher arrives and wants to hear ‘both sides of the story’, that he wants to ‘hear Dr Monk’s version of events before he rushes to judgement’.

  A Hand down the Nation’s Pants

  Gary hasn’t interrupted me, and has listened silently, sometimes wincing at details like the tied hands, the spit on the face – strange how we focus on things like that, how details are the rivets that keep our feelings close to their causes. He looks thoughtful, bites his lip, weighs up what to say. Nothing less than what Wolphram used to call le mot juste will do.

  ‘What a cunt.’

  There are different ways of getting to the truth, but if there’s a shortcut, Gary likes to take it.

  ‘So natty old Mr Wolphram came to save the day?’

  ‘He saved one day, Gary, but there were others, there are always other days when you’re in a place like that. But eventually it got better, yes. Mostly. Though I don’t know if that was just getting older and less of the bad stuff came our way. Maybe it was still going on at the back of our lives. Or whether there was progress … Not that McAlinden was there to see it …’

  ‘The Irish kid left?’

  ‘He wasn’t Irish, Gary. Christ, that’s the whole point, but, yeah, okay – him,’ I reply. ‘He left. That’s another story. Actually, it’s probably the same story, but there’s a sort of interval between the acts. All I know is that day Mr Wolphram took Danny back to his room to clean up his inky face, then took him to the headmaster to tell him the whole story.’

  ‘What happened next?’

  ‘He said leave it with me and it really was left. The Doc stayed, tamed a little, seething with hate for all of us, Wolphram especially, but he had to watch himself. He’d gone too far, got caught, broke the rule of keeping his stuff out of public view. So it was a bit different, yes – the Doc laid off us and we were all moved to another class after Christmas. They pretended that was a normal rearrangement. They shuffled the cards, they didn’t change the deck. We got a different teacher and he was okay. It was a change.’

  ‘Ah yes, the old private school motto: a change of hand on your arse is as good as a rest,’ says Gary.

  ‘Maybe there was a bit of that. Lots of the teachers were violent, a few groped us or touched us – one liked to put his fingers in your mouth – and some were just moody and kicked or slapped us then forgot about it. That all continued as normal. One or two would take us back to their flats for a few drinks and smokes, but we quite liked that – we watched horror films, a bit of porn, and when I was there nothing sexual happened. Though obviously now I realise they were getting off on us being turned on. But there was nothing penetrative, I mean; just the odd caress, the occasional boner pressed into your back like a hostage-taker’s pistol, a touch of the leg on the way up from reaching for a dropped pencil. We heard stuff, but never knew the boys involved or the teacher had moved on, or the boy had left. It always seemed to happen one child away from where you were … people moved school, boys and masters, they didn’t start lawsuits or go to the press or the police. We heard the phrase fresh start a lot …’

  ‘So you watched Top of the Pops to take your mind off things, you envied the kids on Jim’ll Fix It, you wanted to be pressing the buzzers on all those quiz shows and gyrating in front of DJs … but it was all happening there, too, wasn’t it, Prof? British Light Entertainment had a hand down the nation’s pants.’

  ‘We didn’t know anything else, Gary. The ten years – is it ten?’ I make a quick calculation, I’ve been doing that a lot recently: ‘Okay, nine – between you and me make all the difference. The atmosphere was heavy with suppressed paedophilia – largely suppressed, but there were moments when it bypassed the mechanisms of control as they said in the psychology course. But most of it stayed just this side of action. We breathed its fumes, you could say, but the element itself was buried quite far down.’

  ‘The poet strikes again …’

  ‘The other teachers disliked the Doc because he was priggish and self-righteous and his needs were … more about power than sex. He even got married when we were in the sixth form. Maybe that changed him, maybe it was a sign of his having changed. I don’t know. People said he’d got better – you know, just as nasty and backbiting and status-obsessed, but not actually out-and-out persecuting kids. What he liked was his little rituals and role play and performance. So, while no one rushed to defend him, he wasn’t exactly ostracised.’ I think about the Doc being married. ‘If he’s got kids they’re probably not far off your age, Gary.’

  ‘Now you really are scaring me, Prof.’

  ‘We started to hear things – that he’d done it before, that he was fond of these weird little games where people played roles, games which sometimes strayed a bit outside what was decent or normal. But
really he got off on not touching you.’

  ‘He got off on raping your mind, more like,’ says Gary. ‘What about Mr Wolphram? Did that stuff break the ice with him or what? Did he suddenly start high-fiving you in corridors and asking how it was hanging?’

  ‘Hardly. He had borders.’

  ‘That’s not what I’m hearing in the Daily Mail, Prof, or the Sun – they’ve just had a readers’ poll on banning single men from teaching …’

  ‘That stuff about him asking boys about sex or puberty? … totally made up. Cash for lies. Maybe not even cash – attention is enough for some of those fuckers. That was why his outburst that day was so utterly, amazingly, shocking. Because he didn’t express much at all. That stuff you read about his “short fuse” is total bollocks. He’d sometimes say something cutting and you’d baste with shame, but that was more because he was disappointed in you and you were disappointed in yourself – not because he was cruel …’

  ‘Hate to say this, Prof, but he sounds pretty decent.’

  ‘He was. There was no spillage with him, no spillage of emotion or anger or frustration. Or sexual inclination. No small talk. We were still kids, he was an adult. You never saw in his eyes that flare of misfiring desire you saw in some of the others, the ones you knew liked children, or who’d been forced, over the years, to settle for them. You’d be wiping their gaze off your mouth, your neck, the space in your shirt where you’d forgotten to button up and your belly showed. Some of them were always looking for the gaps between buttons or shirt-tails and trousers and they’d give you what we called sticky looks. You’d stretch in class sometimes and as you brought your arms up you’d feel your shirt pulling upwards and the gap of stomach opening as the shirt rose. You’d look at the front of the class and the teacher would be looking at exactly the spot – like they’d heard it, the cotton riding up the flesh and the skin stretching, getting taut. Even the teachers who didn’t primarily like children but just weren’t getting it through the normal – so to speak – channels did that from time to time. Not him. Never. No one’s behaviour was further from the sexual than Mr Wolphram’s.’

  ‘This is the point in the story, Prof, in films, where I say: Go on …’

  ‘Wolphram had nothing to do with the boarding part of the school or with discipline or any of that. A lot of teachers just taught, nothing more. He was one of them. Generally avoided eating in the school dining hall. Our worlds were different. Kids don’t imagine teachers with lives, so we didn’t know if he went home and switched off, went cruising in bars or if he met his friends in restaurants, listened to records, went to the theatre and had holidays, drank good wine and drove a nice car.’

  ‘The latter, by the looks of it,’ says Gary. ‘More’s the fucking pity really because we still don’t have what we need to make a case against him. The more we find out the more – not normal exactly, hardly that – but the more joined up his life seems: he likes being alone, but he’s got friends. Big deal. Call the cops! They say he’s a loner but actually he knows a lot of people and has loads of interests and hobbies. There’s a lot of fucking normality hiding under that weird exterior. It’s meant to be the other way around.’

  ‘What d’you mean joined up, Gary?’

  ‘I mean exactly that – the different bits join together. Mad people, psychos and murderers and abusers and whatever … they’re not joined up, there’s holes, fucking great chasms the size of the English Channel between the different parts of their lives. The different bits of their minds. Like that guy who told kids to kill themselves on the internet: there’s just a big black hole between the way he kisses his own children goodnight and the shit he tells the other ones to do. You can’t explain it except by saying there’s a fucking great hole there. The hole doesn’t bother him because he’s made of it, made of holes, made up of the darkness. Normal people can do abnormal stuff, but it’s always somehow connected, you can see the join, the slope that leads up or down or the place in their heads which makes them do bad things. Your Mr Wolphram is like that: he’s not exactly an ordinary guy, but inside his life it all fits, each bit leads into the other. Like ours.’ He looks at me. ‘Well, like mine.’

  Gary is right – in his Garified way he has explained it. And as it becomes clearer that Wolphram is probably innocent, so, in the press and media, in the police and among politicians, it becomes clearer that he’s guilty.

  We’re responsible for that, Gary and I, and though it might have happened anyway, it would have happened later, and so it would have happened differently.

  ‘That’s news to me, Gary – you couldn’t wait to get him strung up. You took one look at his flat, his stuff, his “gay little sheet music”, and you were ready to put him in clink … You thought the black hood was some kind of auto-erotic toy.’

  ‘And I was right, Prof – just not his.’

  ‘All I mean is that you just went hurtling to conclusions—’

  ‘That’s not me, Prof, that’s my conditioning. That’s my education. That’s the class system. That’s what makes this country great. That’s why we put bulldogs and lions and Churchill and Union Jacks on our Twitter handles …’ Gary is taking the piss. Fair enough. I deserve it.

  ‘So where are they now?’ he asks: ‘Lansdale and the Welsh guy and the geeky one, all the teachers – what happened to them?’

  ‘That headmaster’s still alive. Goodship – I saw him the other day. In the news footage – he’s the old guy with the dog who slows down and looks but doesn’t quite stop. I thought he was dead. He certainly looked like he had Death on a try-before-you-buy basis when I saw him at the post office last Christmas. He had that look some old people have when they think they recognise you but aren’t sure – their eyes plead with you, asking you to tell them if they remember you, asking your memory to do the job of theirs because theirs has all gone soggy, their basement’s flooded. He once hit me over the ear with a book for saying kilometres instead of miles. I’d been at school for precisely four days.’

  ‘Early Brexit hero – there’s probably a statue of him in Dover.’

  ‘He had this odd thing: he collected old Mars bars, used to bring them in in glass cases with little labels and dates. The oldest one from the 1920s. Just Mars bars. “I’m not interested in any other confectionery,” he told us. I don’t know about McCloud – he used to accuse us of “flirting” with him, threatened us with “love and detention”, liked all that innuendo and checked us as we showered to make sure we reached, as he put it ‘every nook and cranny’ – but he was already in his forties back then and didn’t look hardwired for longevity. The Doc is there, Dr Monk, as you saw. Monk must be early sixties, enjoying the velvet coffin of the Headmaster’s House and the Top Table dinners. Free school cufflinks and ties. A few of them are still there probably, the ones who were young in my day. I realise now I was taught by people who were only five or ten years older than I was then … As for the other boys, well, Danny left, I stayed, along with a few of the others – like Gwil who’s now a TV producer in Wales, does those detective thrillers set in Snowdonia, improbably violent and ritualistic murder stories—’

  ‘Love it,’ says Gary, ‘I watch it with subtitles on cable TV. I listen to the Welsh and I look at the English underneath. It’s great. The Hunt it’s called.’

  ‘That’s the one.’ How many has he seen, I wonder.

  ‘Four of the first nine episodes involved people coming back as adults to get their revenge on former teachers or care-home workers … One of the victims was the school chaplain, the other was the …’ Gary slaps his thigh in recognition, ‘the fucking Latin teacher! Oh yes, that’s too good, that is. Now I know where he got the ideas from. Dark as hell.’

  ‘I must watch them,’ I tell Gary, though I’ve seen them all, and I’ve known for years where the ideas came from. I remember Gwil, one night over his pint, promising us he’d make sure it all came out. It did. He has. But as fiction. Maybe that’s better than nothing. ‘Then there was Neil Hall wh
o gave up on being a New Romantic and went to law school … I looked him up once and he was a partner in some big London firm, Rich Nicholson went to Oxford, did okay, wrote for a bit, now a publisher, Dave Sweeting’s a professor – a real one, Gary – of physics at Imperial College or UCL … But we all lost touch years ago. Twenty, twenty-five. For a while we met once or twice a year in the Folkestone Grand Hotel – not Danny – but Gwil and Rich and Neil and a few others who came after Danny left and were okay, but that fizzled out.’

  ‘Well, I still see my mates from school,’ says Gary: ‘Three of them are called Dave: there’s Dave, Boring Dave and The Other Dave, there’s me, the only Gary, surprisingly given what you’d call the C1 social class nature of the friend-group; and Jonny, Lisa, Sarah, Hannah and Holly … yeah, Prof, we had girls in our school and they weren’t an alien species and we didn’t have exotic names and weird punishments designed by grown men to wank to when they got home. We weren’t taught by men who thought Childline was a home delivery service. No one made us take our clothes off and sit in cold baths while teacher took photos. Then again, none of us went off to be MPs, bankers, Chair of the National Trust, newspaper columnists or BBC directors, so maybe it’s us who missed out. We meet in the Cornmarket Vaults at Happy Hour and talk about normal stuff. When we talk about putting hoods over boys’ heads, dangling kids off bridges and checking to see if they’ve washed between their buttocks, it’s because we’ve seen it on TV.’