I was so embarrassed I could not meet her gaze over breakfast. But when my father had gone back up to his study, and before I left for Derby's, she dropped a hand onto mine. "It was nothing," she said. "Forget it."
"I should have knocked."
"You shouldn't worry about it. I've got nothing you haven't seen before."
True, I thought. But she also had something I had not expected to see, something she'd been sensitive about,… and more aware of exposing even than her sex.
Chapter 9
Eventually, I decided to follow where my feelings were leading. I dressed myself in a jacket and tie, which came a close as I could manage to a school uniform, and after pulling my old bike out of the shed, I set off along the old route for County High. It was September now, the morning was bright but with a breath of autumn in it, reminding me of all those first weeks back after the long summer break, and I was reminded too of a peculiar mix of sadness and nervous anticipation of the new term to come.
The first thing I discovered was that it was not a high school any more. That particular title had been misleading, even in the seventies, a crude marketing ploy to raise its head above the alleged mediocrity of an upstart comprehensive system. It was a Beacon School now, according to the notice board. I had no idea what that meant, but the kids looked and sounded just the same as they had to me twenty five years ago. They tore past on their bikes yelling abuse at one another, their blazers flapping in the wind, their quick fire banter like the chatter of machine guns and I almost felt myself one of them again.
Standing outside the gates, I watched these children scampering semi-wild into the same buildings I had known, and in my mind I followed them. I heard the roar of their footsteps on wooden stairs, heard the swish of school bags being kicked across polished floors. I felt their jostling, their pushing and the sheer press of them, carrying me along.
Then I was in a queue, squashed against the wall in the science block, boys down one side, girls down the other. I was fifteen years old and feeling Rachel's presence like the heat from a fire. It was a moment of hope, the promise of which had dragged me from my bed that morning, an occasion when our movements throughout the regulated school week came together. After days of anticipation, our orbits had closed and we were in sight and sound of one another again.
I was looking at her, not openly, more out of the corner of my eye. She was holding her folders against her breast and she was balancing on the sides of her feet, the toes of her navy blue shoes all scuffed. It was a sort of nervous energy and it seemed to fill her from the inside, making her shine. Meanwhile, as I watched, I was willing her to turn her head and look at me, perhaps even to smile. But for all she knew, I might as well not have been there.
Then the physics master arrived, and we filed into class one after the other,… girl, boy, girl, boy. I tried to judge it so we'd be close as we squeezed through the door.
"Hi," I'd say.
"Hi."
"Can we talk later?"
"How about break time?"
"Yes - there's something I have tell you."
"I know. It's all right, I feel the same. Later then?"
"Later."
And then at break time, I'd find her sitting on the wall outside the girl's gym, toes together, head down and as I walked up to her, she'd lift her eyes, riveting me to the spot with a stare.
"I want to be with you," she'd say.
Wonderful! Except, of course, it didn't happen. I'm sure there were occasions when we did indeed brush by one another, but the words always died on my lips, and I'd feel the grief of them consuming me for the rest of the day. I recalled that grief now, felt it burning through and draining me of energy, of spirit. It's intensity startled me. How could the pain be real when the memory was so old?
Resurfacing with start into the present, I began to feel conspicuous, loitering outside of the school. A bloke in a collar and tie stands out these days and one has to be careful - there seem to be more bogeymen around than there were in the seventies, or at least we talk about them more,… daring to be more definitive, giving them names like drug-dealer and paedophile - and as I had already discovered, a man on his own with the wrong look about him had better watch out or he'll end up wearing the first tag anyone might care to toss his way.
Suddenly nervous, I locked my bike to the railings and walked into the school grounds, trying to convey the impression I knew what I was doing. The secretary's office was where it had always been, though there was a sophisticated security system now with cameras observing all the comings and goings. I'd barely crossed the threshold when the voice of a young woman arrested me.
"Can I help you?"
"I'm Tom," I said and I tried to smile, as if to say: "I'm harmless," but I fear it came out as more of a sneer. "I used to come here as a kid. I know it's probably not a good time,… "
She looked at me, sceptically. She was about twenty five and probably couldn't believe the school had even been built when I was a kid.
"If it's about a reunion, I could probably put you in touch with the right person."
"A reunion?"
"Most of the years have a reunion secretary."
"They do?"
"Of course. When did you leave?"
"Erm… '77."
"Ooh, I don't know. That is a long time ago. Wait there I'll have a look."
I did as I was told, sitting in the foyer while the nosy kids gawked at me.
"Sorry," said the secretary. "We only go back to 1980,… "
"I see. I don't suppose there's any chance of having a look around is there?"
"I'm sure Mr. Shaw would be glad to show you around," said the girl. "But you'll need to make an appointment. Can I have your telephone number?"
"Sure." I could already feel the momentum leaving me. I didn't see the point but I scribbled my number down anyway, and then I looked at her. "That wouldn't be John Shaw, would it? He used to be my geography teacher."
"I know he's been here a long time." She thought for a moment. "Tell you what, wait there. I'll have a word with him. He might be able to spare you a few minutes."
I recognised him straight away, though he must have been sixty. He didn't know me of course in spite of the fact he'd bollocked me regularly throughout his dubious tutorship. He smiled, shook my hand, then had me sit down while the secretary brought us tea. To my amazement, I discovered I still disliked him.
"I know you must be busy," I said. "I didn't want to take up your time. It's just that I've been thinking about the place a lot recently and I wondered what it would be like to walk down the corridors, maybe look inside a few of the classrooms."
"Ghosts, eh?" he said.
He surprised me. I'd always thought of him as an insensitive bastard. "Ghosts,… yes, you might say that." After tea, and much quizzing about my year, he claimed to remember me, but I think he was just being polite.
"I can give you a ten minute tour, Tom." he said.
He'd never called me Tom before, always Thomas. Tom's too informal when you're yelling smart mouthed abuse at someone.
"That would be great," I replied.
From the outside, the school looked much the same - there's only so much you can do with architecture I suppose, but it was on the inside the passage of time had made its mark. For a start, it seemed brighter. I remembered drab walls, a sort of uniform eggshell blue, and it had been in need of a good scrub. Now it was all pastel shades, and the corridors, which had once rung out to the sound of footsteps and sliding bags, were now hushed by co-ordinating carpets. The classrooms were neater, brighter,… less formal with more carpets, and there were computers everywhere.
It all seemed much smaller, even though at fifteen I'd already reached my adult height of five feet nine. I gazed around, puzzled by the reduced scale. Were my other memories similarly distorted? Were those lovelorn moments, those feelings of despair, also exaggerated in my mind, blown up out of all proportion into a misleading caricature of the truth?
&
nbsp; It was the metalwork lab that surprised me the most. It had gone: ripped out, along with the subject to be replaced by something called technology. Now, in all modesty, I thought I knew a thing or two about technology. Along with our car-mad metalwork teacher, we had rebuilt cars in this room - Mini Coopers and Mark One Escorts and we'd raced them at Oulton Park,… but so far as I could work out these days technology consisted of making things from cardboard and bent coat-hangars.
I picked up a curious contraption made of paper and flimsy wooden doweling. It had been crudely painted in primary colours and resembled a sort of three dimensional Picasso. "What does this do, then?" I asked.
"Well," said Mr Shaw,… "It sort of flaps its wings." And then registering my surprise he went on defensively: "It's not so much the object that's important, Tom, as the way the children set about tackling the problem."
"Ah,… " I said,… . understanding not a word. "But there used to be machine tools in here. And in that room over there, there were drawing boards, rows and rows of them - I got an O level in engineering drawing - that's what set me down the road to being a designer, I suppose."
Mr Shaw smiled patiently. "We stripped that lot out years ago," he said. "It didn't seem relevant any more. We're not in the business of raising factory fodder these days. No factories to send them to anyway, are there? Children deserve better than that. We see ourselves as being more in the business of turning out well rounded adults."
Is that what I'd been then I wondered? Factory fodder? But I was an engineer, a designer, a professional - I had the letters after my name to prove it! I know Derby's had used me up and were now preparing to spit me out, but they'd paid me for my trouble, paid for the mortgage on my nice house, paid for a newish car every four or five years,… . isn't that what it was all about: making an honest living?
We finished our tour back in the reception area, where I was left feeling like some sort of antique. By the age of sixteen, I'd learned the rudiments of cutting metal here and how to produce an engineering drawing to the stringent requirements of British Standards. I'd also stripped a Cosworth engine down to piece parts, rebuilt it and watched it being driven like crazy round a race track. But it was all irrelevant now. Like me, it seemed: irrelevant, brushed away by a bright new order, crushed beneath legions of brightly coloured flapping things.
"Well, thank you Mr Shaw. I'm glad I've seen it. It all looks very nice,… very neat,… very erm,… stimulating."
Children were traipsing past, a long procession, hundreds and hundreds of them, heading from the assembly hall to their classes. Where would they go, I wondered, when they left, these well rounded adults? But Shaw was right. There were no factories, no places like Derby's any more to open their doors every September to swallow down the latest batch of fodder. Still, even well rounded adults needed jobs and they couldn't all work at the burger bar. Perhaps more of them stayed on at college than they had done in my days, but what then? They couldn't remain students for ever?
"I'll be off," I said, still puzzled by it all, and then as an after thought I asked him: "I don't suppose you remember a girl called Rachel Standish do you? Same year as me. Dark haired,… ."
He shrugged and glanced at his watch. "Sorry," he said.
"No. It was a long time ago."
Too much water had passed,… a torrent in fact, washing away all trace of Rachel and me. The world we had prepared ourselves for in those days had begun to change almost the moment we had walked out of the door. I wondered what she was doing now. Had she found something of more lasting relevance, or was she looking back, like me and wondering what the hell it had all been for?
I mounted the bike and cycled off slowly. There was a familiar heaviness in my heart, like I'd always felt after another day leaving this place without hearing her say those words. I didn't know if this was good or bad, because my more recent past had been characterised by a lack of any feeling at all. Even my divorce and the pending estrangement of my children seemed to have left me feeling nothing but a kind of sickly numbness. This pain was twenty five years old, but at least I felt it. It proved to me I was still capable of feeling something. I gathered the pain around me as I rode and I savoured it. Eleanor and Joni Mitchel were right, I thought: there is comfort in melancholy!
My father was painting the gatepost when I cycled up to him.
"How'd it go then?" he asked.
I was still trying to absorb what I'd seen. "It used to be about jobs," I said. "Now it seems to be about preparing well rounded adults for something or other. I'm not quite sure what."
"Would these be the same well rounded adults who daubed 'Donna is a twat' on these gateposts, then?" he asked.
I retired early that evening and lay in bed with the new sketchbook open on my lap, a freshly sharpened 2B pencil poised and I remained like that for a long while, contemplating the blank page, before daring to bring the pencil down and make a mark. It was just a line, a little wavy, like the string of an instrument that had been plucked. I tried another to see if anything suggested itself to me - a face, a flower, a voluptuous hillside - but there was nothing. I tried more lines but they seemed only to make the confusion worse, like a web tangling up my imagination. In the end I erased them, too ashamed to have anyone see them. Then I put the book back on the bedside table.
Instead, I lay twiddling the dial on my radio - tuning in to the static at about 208 metres, straining for the sound of Radio Luxembourg, for Bob Stewart and the Top Forty, even the commercial jingles that had been so familiar back then, but there was nothing,… just impenetrable static where my youth had once been. It was impossible, I thought. You can never go back.
I looked over to Rachel's photograph. "I want to be with you," I said.
I didn't mean it,… not in the sense you're probably thinking. She'd be married now with kids. She'd be nothing like the person in the photograph, the person I remembered. It was more what she had come to mean, the last emotional signpost I'd passed on that long road before branching off into the amorphous fog of my adulthood - the road along which the poetry inside of me had died.
Of course, none of this was very productive. I'd landed myself in a mess and sooner or later I'd have to pick myself up and move on, except I no longer trusted myself to choose the right path any more. I had to make sense of the past twenty five years of my life, and it was impossible to do that without thinking of Rachel. Perhaps it went deeper still. Perhaps I would not be able to close with any of it until I had seen her. I would have to look into her eyes. I would have to ask her out, in that quaint old fashioned sense, regardless of her situation - ask her if she wanted to be with me. Only then, when she had looked at me in utter disbelief and I had felt the sting of her rejection, only then could I dismiss her, clear my mind of everything I knew, and move on into that far country which was all that remained of the rest of my life.
Chapter 10
It began as an idle notion, an exercise in thought, but gained momentum in my head until it seemed the most obvious thing to do,… to find her. It was not simply to ask her, for I felt ultimately I would perhaps still lack the courage, but more to put myself again within her orbit and to examine quite coldly any feelings she might still arouse. She was a ghost cut loose and needed laying to rest.
It made sense to start with Langholm Avenue. I'd told the policewoman I believed Rachel no longer lived there, but I hadn't known for sure. All I'd had to go on was the fact that most people move on. But then my father had lived in the same house since 1958, so I wondered if it might be possible Rachel's parents were still there in Langholm Avenue as well. It wasn't so reasonable to hope Rachel would be there too, but contacting her parents would be the first step in finding out where she'd gone. The problem was how to do that with discretion.
Rachel,
You won't remember me but we were at County High together and I was wondering if you'd be interested in attending a reunion for our year. I should add that I've not made any definite arrangements yet. I'm just
testing to see how much interest there is and how many ex pupils from our year I can trace. If you're still in touch with anyone else who might be interested, I'd be grateful for any leads.
Please write to the above address or call me.
Regards
Thomas Norton.
Eleanor watched the letter creeping out of the printer. "You crafty beggar," she said.
"It seemed the best approach. The school secretary gave me the idea. Well, I can hardly tell Rachel I just want to look her in the eyes and hear her say she doesn't want to be my girlfriend, can I?"
"So you've made up your mind to trace her then? "
"Yes. I think you're right. She was the first really big thing ever to happen to me and it was just left hanging in the middle of nowhere. I need to finish it. I need to see her,… to see how much she's changed. Maybe the shock of that will bring me to my senses."
"So you've no intentions of actually organising a reunion?"
"Hell,… no! I wouldn't know where to start. Anyway, I'm not interested in anyone else. Only her."
"Charming!"
"If her parents are still in Langholm Avenue, they'll pass it on, I guess. Then she'll write, or call, and say she's interested."
"And after that?"
"I'll suggest we meet for lunch, or a drink or something. I'll see her and it'll be over."
The Road From Langholm Avenue Page 6