‘I still don’t think there’s anybody there,’ Sara whispered. ‘This is just a power outage, that’s all.’
‘If you don’t think there’s anybody there, why are you whispering?’
‘In case it isn’t a power outage, and there is.’
‘This is crazy. I’m going to go for the light switch.’
‘Bobby, be careful.’
Bobby felt his way off the edge of the bed, holding on to the brass rails to guide himself, and swinging his left arm from side to side to feel his way.
‘Are you all right?’ asked Sara. ‘How can it be so dark? You’d think that there’d be some light, coming from the highway.’
‘I’m almost at the door,’ Bobby told her. ‘I can feel the door frame. I can feel the light switch.’
He clicked the light switch up and down, but nothing happened. The beach house remained totally black, without even a chink of light from the shuttered windows. Normally, the sky was filled with sodium light from the Pacific Coast Highway, but not tonight.
‘Maybe the circuit-breaker’s gone.’
‘But if there are no lights anywhere, it must be the power company.’
Ker-chikk. Now it was really close, only inches away from Bobby.
‘I’m warning you!’ he yelled. ‘I have a shotgun here and I’m going to count to three and then I’m going to fire!’
‘It’s no good shouting at it if it’s an insect,’ said Sara.
‘It’s not an insect! I don’t know what the hell it is! It’s right here! It’s right in front of me!
He waved his arms wildly from side to side but he couldn’t feel anything. ‘There’s nothing here! There’s nothing here! Oh shit, Sara, there’s nothing here!’
‘Stop it!’ Sara screamed at him. ‘Stop it, you’re scaring me!’
Bobby took two or three steps backwards and collided with the bed. He negotiated his way around the brass bed rails and climbed back on to it, reaching out for Sara’s hand. He was panting with terror.
‘If there’s nothing there,’ said Sara, ‘there’s nothing for us to be scared of.’ She didn’t sound at all convinced.
‘There’s something there, but it’s nothing.’
‘What do you mean, it’s nothing?’
‘I don’t know. But it’s there. I mean, we can hear it, right? Even if we can’t feel it.’
They waited for over a minute. Normally, they would have expected their eyes to grow accustomed to the darkness, but even after all this time, they couldn’t see anything at all. It was almost like being buried alive.
‘What the hell’s wrong with the power company?’ Bobby complained. ‘Why don’t they put the lights back on?’
But then, very faintly, they saw a shimmering shape in the doorway. It shifted and rippled, as if they were viewing it through running water.
‘What is that?’ Sara whispered. ‘It looks like a moth.’
Bobby stared at the shape intently. It had two white blotches on either side, which could have been wings. But as it gradually brightened, he realized that they weren’t wings at all, but eye sockets. The shape was a human face, except that it looked like a photographic negative, with white hair and black skin and shadows in varying shades of white and gray.
‘Oh my God,’ said Sara. ‘What is it? It’s not a ghost, is it?’
‘OK, whoever you are!’ said Bobby in the most challenging tone he could manage. ‘I can see you now, OK? And you have to get the hell out of here, because this property belongs to Mr and Mrs John D. Tubbs and you don’t have any right to be here. So just go.’
There was silence, but then there was a soft ker-chikk, and the face was suddenly much closer. Because it was negative, it was impossible to tell it if was young or old. But its white eyes were wide open and staring at them, and its black teeth were bared.
Sara was gripping Bobby’s hand so tightly that her false fingernails were digging into him. ‘What is it?’ she gasped. ‘Oh God, make it go away!’
But Bobby couldn’t speak. The face brought back all of the nightmares that used to wake him up when he was younger. It was the face of everything terrible that hid during the day, but came out of concealment as soon as it grew dark. The things that hid at the end of the alleyway, inside the rusty old water tank. The strange faces that looked at him from passing buses; or disappearing round the corner; or reflected in storefront windows. You turned around, and they were gone; or else they had never been there. But they were frightening beyond all reason because they knew you, and they knew where to find you, and they knew what really scared you.
There was another ker-chikk, and the face jumped right up to the end of the bed. Bobby couldn’t stop himself from jerking backwards, his heart thumping like a rabbit.
‘Go away!’ screamed Sara. ‘Go away and leave us alone!’
The face stayed where it was, staring at them. But then they heard a slurred, muffled voice, like somebody talking in another room.
‘Thought you could walk away, did you? Nobody walks away. Not without regretting it. Not without paying the price.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Bobby demanded. ‘We don’t even know you!’
‘Oh, you know me better than you think. And now you’re going to suffer for it.’
‘What do you want? Just tell me what you want. You want money? My parents have money. Just take what you want and get out of here, please.’
‘You know what I want. I want to see you pay the price.’
‘Price? What price? What are we supposed to have done?’
‘The price of disloyalty, my friends. The price of contempt.’
There was something in the voice that Bobby recognized. He peered at the face more intently, and then he sat back on his heels. ‘This is a trick, isn’t it? This is a goddamn practical joke.’
‘What?’ said Sara.
‘They’ve fooled us.’ He waved his hand in front of the face, and it didn’t even blink. ‘This is some kind of projection. I’ll bet Dudley set it up. They’re watching us now and they’re probably wetting themselves. “The price of contempt,” my ass.’
‘Are you serious? This is just a joke?’
‘Of course it is. Look at it.’
‘But how did they know we were going to get together tonight? How did they know we were going to come here? How have they managed to make it so dark?’
‘I don’t know. But I’m sure going to find out when I sit on Dudley’s head.’
‘You think this is a trick?’ asked the negative face.
‘Yes, as a matter of fact. For the simple reason that I don’t believe in ghosts or demons or … or faces that hover at the end of the bed. Are you getting this, Dudley? I’m going to have your guts for a golf bag, I warn you.’
‘You think this is a joke?’ the face persisted.
‘Yes, I do.’
‘Then smile.’
Bobby was just about to say something when the entire world went white. The bedroom was blotted out with intense, dazzling light, as if a hydrogen bomb had gone off. He felt a shock wave of unbearable heat that scorched him all over, and as he tried to twist himself away from it, the last thing he saw was Sara with her hair on fire and her face charred black.
Two
Jim walked into Special Class II without even looking at the fifteen students who were there, sitting with their feet on their desks, tossing paper darts, listening to garage music on their earphones, phone-texting their friends in other classrooms, reading X-Men comics, fixing their lip gloss, and practicing their dance steps.
He sat down at his desk and laid both hands on it, palm-down, like a lounge-bar pianist who doesn’t think he can face playing ‘Strangers in the Night’, not again. He looked tired and gaunt, and he had two days’ growth of stubble on his chin. His mousy hair was messed up as if he hadn’t bothered to comb it, and his blue check shirt was crumpled as if he hadn’t bothered to press it. His tan corduroy pants had a stain on the left leg that could have been anyt
hing from tomato catsup to cat food.
He opened his briefcase by untying the string that held the broken catch together. He took out a dog-eared book, opened it and started to read it in silence. One after another, the students became aware of his presence, and even though they didn’t all stop what they were doing, they turned their eyes on to him, and spoke more quietly, and gradually the dance steps petered out.
It was ten minutes before he said anything. ‘Today,’ he finally said, taking off his thumb-printed glasses, ‘we’re going to talk about time. What time is, and what time does to us, and how we express our feelings about it.’
‘About time,’ said Freddy Price, and everybody laughed.
‘Well, I’m sorry if I’m two weeks late,’ said Jim. ‘I hope that Mrs Lakenheath kept you entertained. I wasn’t really expecting to come back here at all, as a matter of fact. But that’s time for you. You stroll off into the future, whistling to yourself, and before you know it, you’re right back where you started from.’
Sonny Powell raised a long black arm. ‘Pardon my saying so, sir, but it don’t seem to me like you is exactly overjoyed to be back.’ Sonny was 6ft 7in tall and everybody called him the Shadow because of his obsession with his Saucony Shadow running shoes, and because he overshadowed everybody else in the class. ‘Like, if you don’t feel like learning us or nothing, we don’t mind just carrying on doing what we’re doing. Let sleeping dogs sleep, if you know what I mean.’ He bounced his basketball three or four times just to make the point.
Jim stood up and walked to the classroom window. ‘Tempting, I have to admit. But the trouble with that idea is, I came back here to West Grove Community College because I need to find out something about myself. I need educating, even more urgently than you do. Now, none of you may be interested in learning anything, and quite frankly I don’t care if you don’t. If you want to stay ignorant and illiterate, that’s entirely your choice. But I need to learn something, and I’m sorry if it’s an inconvenience, but I need your help to do it.
He turned around to face them. ‘This class may be called Remedial English, but it isn’t going to be all about spelling, or reading, or writing. This class is going to be all about living in a world that doesn’t give anybody an even break; and what to do when your luck runs out – if you had any luck to begin with – and all of the tricks and traps and petty cruelties that make you wonder if it’s worth getting out of bed in the morning.
He had his students’ attention now. Even Vanilla King had stopped in mid-nail-polishing, her brushful of Tangerine Sparkle poised in the air.
Jim said, ‘This class is going to be all about survival. How to stay alive and well on a highly dangerous planet.’
‘What, you going to be learnin’ us road safety and like that?’ asked Roosevelt Jones, from the back of the class. Roosevelt was short and stocky, with a shiny shaved head and mirror sunglasses.
Jim shook his head. ‘I’m not going to be telling you anything. You’re going to be telling me. If you must know, I’ve forgotten how to keep going. I’ve lost my faith that everything’s going to turn out for the better. I don’t believe that it’s going to be another bright sunshiny day.’
‘We can’t learn you nothing, man,’ said Shadow. ‘You the Teach. You suppose to be learning us.’
Edward Truscott put up his hand. ‘Actually, you don’t “learn” somebody something. You teach them. Otherwise, think about it, you wouldn’t call him the Teach. You’d call him the Learn.’
‘Are you messing with my head again, geek?’ Shadow demanded, with exaggerated anger. ‘If education turns a person into you, you pasty white string of spaghetti, then I don’t want none of it.’
Jim said, ‘Like I said – if you don’t want to be educated, that’s your concern entirely. But you’re wrong when you say that you don’t have anything to teach me. You do. You’re young, you’re fresh, you’re unsullied. You still have confidence in who you are, and what tomorrow’s going to bring you, and that’s what I want to learn.’
‘You was here before, sir, wasn’t you?’ asked Ruby Montes. She had a mountain of black wavy hair and earrings like Christmas trees.
‘Yes, I was. Three years ago. But I was offered a very interesting job in Washington with the department of education, and I went.’
‘So why’d you come back?’ asked Roosevelt. ‘Wasn’t the pay no good?’
‘The pay was fine. The job was fine. Something happened, that’s all.’
‘Like what? You was caught in the stationery closet with some foxy teacher?’
Jim gave him a weary smile. ‘Let’s put it this way … Something bad happened. Something tragic. Something that made me realize that you can run away from everything in this life, except yourself.’
‘That’s very true,’ said George Graves. He had very badly chopped hair and a long, horse-like face. ‘No matter where you wake up in the morning … well, you’re always there, aren’t you?’
‘Where else would you be, fool?’ asked Shadow.
Freddy Price said, ‘I don’t know. I woke up the morning after my New Year’s party and I definitely wasn’t there.’
Nervously, hesitantly, Sue-Marie Cassidy put up her hand. She had long, straight, gleaming blonde hair, and a face that could have been classically beautiful if she hadn’t applied so much eye make-up and so much lipstick, and her mouth hadn’t pouted so much. For her last birthday, her mother had paid for collagen injections for her lips. Now she looked more Baywatch than Botticelli.
‘What was it exactly that happened to you in Washington?’ she asked in a husky voice. ‘I mean, you say it was tragic.’
Jim said, ‘It was, yes. But it was something I’d rather not talk about, just at the moment. I want to move on … so I’m going to make believe that I never went to Washington. In fact, I’m going to make believe that I’m still thirty-four years old and that I never left West Grove at all.’
‘Shouldn’t you, like, face up to it, whatever it was?’ asked Delilah Bergenstein. Her real name wasn’t Delilah but she had dark, cat-like eyes and a beauty spot on her cheek and she liked to think she looked like an Old Testament seductress.
‘Are you interested in psychiatry?’ asked Jim.
Delilah nodded with enthusiasm. ‘That’s what I eventually want to be, a psychiatrist. But – you know – my English needs a little work.’
‘Yeah – like you can’t spell psychiatrist,’ put in Randy Bullock, who sat right in front of her.
‘I’ll bet money that you can’t spell it, either,’ said Edward Truscott scornfully.
‘Like, I don’t need to, genius. I’m going into fast food, me.’
‘Looks like the fast food went into you, fatso.’
Jim returned to his desk. ‘OK, that’s enough free association. If you’re going to teach me anything, we’re going to need some structure. Some starting points for discussion. Let’s start by defining time.’
Special Class II looked at each other in bewilderment. George Graves noisily blew his nose on a crumpled-up scrap of toilet tissue and Ruby Montes flapped her hand at him in disgust. ‘I just had breakfast. I really want to hear your snot bubble, you know?’
‘OK,’ said Jim. ‘What do we mean by time? Can anybody tell me what it is?’
Roosevelt leaned back in his chair and said, ‘Time is like what allows you to stop doing something, say like eating pizza, and do something else, say like crashing out in front of the TV. I mean, if it wasn’t for time, you’d be eating pizza over and over, because it was never time to do nothing else, and you’d be sick to your stomach of eating pizza. You’d also start looking like Randy over there, you know, like three people rolled into one.’
‘Hey,’ Randy protested. ‘Just because you look like a famine appeal.’
David Robinson stood up, right at the back of the class. As he did so, the sun lit up his bright red crewcut and his scarlet ears. He said, ‘Time is the difference between human beings and God.’ Then he hesitated and lo
oked around. The rest of the class were all noisily pretending to yawn.
‘Go on,’ Jim encouraged him.
‘Well, we grow old, don’t we? but God never does. That’s why God knows so much more than we do. We spend our whole lives learning stuff, but when we die, everything we ever learned, it’s all forgotten.’
‘That’s totally right,’ Shadow interrupted, with a mock serious frown. ‘Like, what is the point of going to all that stress of filling up your head with how to spell psychiatry and what the capital of Paris is, when you’re only going to end up dead, and what good is all that information then? They don’t have no spelling bees in the boneyard.’
Jim opened the dog-eared book on his desk. ‘I’m going to read you a poem,’ he said. ‘It’s all about time, and fate, and I want you to think about it and tell me if it affects your view of things. It’s called “The Clock and the Cake” by James McFadden.
At five the clock strikes five
And, just as yesterday, the cake is cut
And handed round amid the conversation and the smiles
The cake is like the clock and each slice disappears
Like time, and life, and all the passing miles’
Vanilla King started polishing the nails on her right hand, her tongue stuck between her teeth in concentration. Randy Bullock twisted his finger in his left ear and then examined it. There was a lot of coughing and shuffling and somebody at the back was having an intense, whispered conversation, but Jim carried on.
‘At ten the clock was speechless
Not yet wound up, and waiting for its key
The showers had passed and sunlit glistened on the path.
The clock was like a friend who chose to wait
While we caught up, and we caught up at last.
‘At four the clock struck slowly
Its spring so slackened it could barely chime
I woke, and heard it like a warning from the years to pass
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