by Guy Burt
My mother asks me what I think of the idea of going to school. It is a relief; it saves me from having to ask her the same thing. The only sad thing is that I am in the year below Jamie – he’s eight, but I’m still seven – and so I can only see him at break-times and after class. It’s not enough.
School is strange to start with, but not so bad after a while. I have always been an outsider with the children of the town, a foreigner; sometimes weird; a bit slow. I realize that I have expected the children to think the same way about Jamie, but they don’t: Jamie is a person it is impossible not to like. He is open and friendly to everyone, and brave and good-looking and clever without being too clever. I think in school he is sometimes a little lazy in his lessons, but his teachers can forgive him anything. At break-time he keeps mostly away from the games of football that are so central a part of the playground culture; but sometimes he will join in, called to by the players. The fluidity of his movement when he does makes the other boys look as awkward and monolithic beside him as I always feel. He isn’t interested in soccer, though. His ability to run – to set his feet surely and certainly on any terrain, to co-ordinate his whole body to the rhythm of his footfalls, to seem suspended half an inch above the ground itself – is something he takes for granted, like the colour of his hair or eyes. He is inevitably popular. He puts me back in the centre of things, too: I gain an acceptance simply by being near him.
Nobody thinks of Jamie as being an outsider.
But then things start to go wrong. Although my first year is fun, after that my lessons start to become more and more of a struggle. The more structured the subjects are, the more overwhelmed I am by confusion. Having thought I was starting to make sense of my world, it now seems to be coming apart around me once again.
The concepts of mathematics are impenetrable to me. I stare at the symbols and numbers on the board of our classroom with increasing desperation, while around me the other children copy down the sums and work out the answers. It is learning to read all over again; endless hours of tedious incomprehension, broken into only by the unintentional travels my mind takes. Going places in your head. To begin with I am a joke that even the teachers find a bit amusing – dreamy Alex. Vacant Alex. Then I am a nuisance, an irritation. Lazy. Finally I am a serious concern, and my parents are called in.
Miserably, I sit at home with Lena waiting for them to return. Lena tries to cheer me up, but it’s no good.
‘I try to understand,’ I say. ‘I try really hard. But nothing happens.’
‘Don’t be sad, little Alex,’ she says. ‘It will come, you’ll see.’
‘Can you do maths, Lena?’
‘Yes. I can add up the groceries faster than the girl in the supermercato,’ she says with a smile. ‘For all she’s got a machine to help her.’ I try to smile; the supermercato is in Salerno, and we sometimes go there to buy things we can’t get in town, like the English gin my father likes. Lena’s scathing opinion of the place and its employees is well known to me. But it is difficult to fall into the old jokes.
She goes on, ‘People learn things at different speeds, you know. It doesn’t mean you’re stupid.’
‘Maybe I am stupid,’ I say.
‘No you aren’t. You’re – thoughtful, that’s what. You think about things.’ She laughs gently. ‘Perhaps sometimes you’re thinking about things too much to learn, eh?’
But I know this isn’t true; it is Jamie who thinks about things, not me.
A while after my parents go into school, my mother takes me to see a doctor – a specialist. I am excused classes for a day to make the trip to Salerno. We go in the car, my mother out of her element and driving with an air of terrible focus and constant apprehension. The further we go from the dusty valley of Altesa into the stark, industrialized landscape of the city, the more apprehensive I become.
In Dr Ribecci’s office I stare at coloured lights, and flashing lights. There is a little drum with black and white lines on it which he spins round for me to look at, and a little torch he shines in my eyes. I have to read numbers and letters from a board – I am pleased to be able to do this. I don’t like Dr Ribecci much. My mother sits all the while twisting the cuff of her blouse. I am very careful all the time not to go away, because Jamie has told me to keep the going places thing a secret. He says that doctors might not understand it. It is comforting, as I watch the flashing lights and read the numbers and letters, to know that Jamie, at least, does understand.
At the end of all the tests, I can tell Dr Ribecci is a little puzzled and a little irritated. I am not any of the things that he has thought I might be. I can see well, and hear well, and look at flashing lights and spinning drums with no trouble at all.
In the car on the way home, my mother seems preoccupied. I watch her for a while, and then say, ‘At least I’m not putty-mal.’
‘What, darling?’
‘What the doctor said.’ I think briefly. ‘“There are no primary indications of putty-mal.” That’s good, isn’t it?’
My mother blinks, frowning. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Yes, darling, that’s good.’ She doesn’t sound quite sure, though.
When we get home, my father isn’t sure either. I can hear his voice raised from where I am, at the top of the stairs. ‘Nothing? He can’t find anything wrong at all?’ There is an angry silence; then, ‘Well, that settles it. I’ve thought all along he was just being idle. He learns fast enough when the mood takes him, doesn’t he?’
There is the sound of my mother’s voice, protesting, the words not discernible.
‘Well, perhaps that’s the whole problem. You’re soft on him. Lena’s soft on him, too. And he spends too much time with that Anderson boy. If he made the same effort with his schoolwork that he makes with those – damned comic books, he wouldn’t be so far behind.’
Again there are the quieter sounds of my mother, trying to smooth things over. She must manage it, because the row never makes it up to the first floor of the house, remaining instead lodged in the living room, where it eventually burns itself out into mutterings.
The next day, though, before school, my father takes me on one side.
‘You have to concentrate, Alex,’ he says, seriously. ‘How can you remember things if you don’t concentrate?’
‘I try,’ I say, looking at my shoes.
‘Well, try trying a bit harder.’
I can tell from his tone that he’s not angry, exactly; he’s trying to jolly me along. I nod. ‘I will,’ I say.
‘Good man. That’s all we want.’ He pauses, then tips my chin up so I have to look at him. ‘You know you can manage it when you try. Just look at your reading. That happened in the end, didn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ I say.
‘And that was because you worked at it,’ he says. ‘It wasn’t always easy, but you got there in the end. That’s what you have to do at school.’
‘OK.’
I am left with the strangest feeling that the history of the past year is changing around me; that the details of the ‘miracle’ are no longer quite so miraculous. In a flash of rare insight, I wonder whether by the end of another year, anyone will remember anything unusual about the way I learned to read.
I go to wait for Jamie before school on Friday, eager to tell him all about my visit, and all the tests. I have only been there for a minute or two when Mr Anderson comes out. He has his hands deep in his trouser pockets and he looks, I think, uncomfortable.
‘Buongiorno,’ I say politely.
‘Hello, Alex,’ Mr Anderson says. His Italian is much better than my father’s – he doesn’t have that strange, awkward accent that my father has – but he talks to me today in English. ‘Ah – Jamie won’t be coming to school today, I’m afraid. You’ll have to walk in on your own.’
This is the first time something like this has happened. ‘Is he all right?’ I say. ‘Is he ill?’
‘No,’ says Mr Anderson, shortly. ‘He’s in trouble.’
‘Oh.’
‘You’d better get along now, or you’ll be late.’ And he turns and goes back inside the house.
It’s my fault Jamie’s in trouble. I have to piece it together bit by bit over the course of the day, from things overheard, from gossip in the playground, but that’s what it comes down to: it’s my fault. If I hadn’t gone to the doctor, nothing would have happened.
On Thursday, when I am not at school, there is the normal interest in where I’ve gone. Someone – Jamie says later that he suspects Signorina Martelli, our Maths teacher – lets it be known that I am away because I have to see a doctor in Salerno. A special doctor. The school quickly makes the connection between special doctors and my occasional strangenesses in class. A girl in Jamie’s year comes forward with the impressive assertion that her cousin has been to see a special doctor, and that he is no longer allowed to go to disco parties or even to watch television, because these things make him weird. The special doctor makes clear and official what is wrong with the English boy: he is weird in the head, probably insane. Word in the playground quickly determines that I may never come back; that sometimes they lock people like that up.
By the lunchtime break, everyone is in on the story. In a group by the painted goalposts of the soccer pitch, one boy is explaining what happens to people like the English boy once they’ve been locked up. Quite a little crowd has gathered to hear his ideas. Because of the crowd, he isn’t able to see Jamie attach himself to the edge of it. Before anyone knows quite what has happened, Jamie has heard what the boy is saying, has pushed through the crowd to its centre, and has knocked the boy down.
The boy is older and heavier than Jamie: a tough-looking lad who, on his back in the dust and holding the lip that’s been split across his teeth, looks dazed with pain but also stunned with surprise. The crowd instinctively pulls back, makes a ring around the two boys. From around the playground, others join. Someone starts a chant of ‘Fight! Fight!’
The older boy gets to his feet, shaking his head. Jamie waits until he’s standing, and then hits him a second time: a hard, straight punch to the face which knocks him over again. Something about the way he does it – the clinical neatness of the punch, the lack of bravado, no threats or posturing or hesitation – gets through to the crowd. The chant of ‘Fight!’ dies abruptly, and an uneasy silence takes its place. The older boy’s nose is bleeding and there is blood in the dust. The fight should be over, but the tautness of Jamie’s body says it isn’t. His hands are loose, unclenched, but not hanging by his sides; they’re slightly elevated, ready, his shoulders ready, his eyes waiting.
When he sees that the boy isn’t going to get up again, Jamie says, ‘Don’t say things like that about my friend.’
Everyone hears it. He turns, then, looks at the ring of children that has gathered, and in his eyes each of them sees that he’s ready to fight anyone there: they see the way his hands are ready, and the circle spreads wider, as if his gaze is pushing them back. ‘Don’t any of you say things like that.’
His face is white, but his voice is very even. One of the younger girls starts suddenly to cry.
* * *
Jamie and the other boy are sent home and told not to come back until after the weekend. Nothing like this has ever happened before, and for a week or more Jamie and I are the centre of all the attention of the school. But embarrassing and awkward though this is, at least my fears of reprisals prove unfounded. Nobody picks on me. After a while, I realize that nobody ever will: they’re scared. I start to understand how good it is to have a friend like Jamie.
‘There’s another,’ I say. ‘How many’s that?’
‘I don’t know. I lost count.’
We stare up at the night sky, sated with shooting stars, full of sleepy contentment. Jamie says, ‘It’ll be my birthday soon.’
‘I know. What’re you going to do?’
‘There’ll be a party,’ he says. ‘I’m going to invite some people from school.’
‘And me.’
‘Mm – all right, you can come.’
I giggle and punch his arm gently. ‘Anyone else?’
‘Anna’s coming,’ he says.
‘Who’s Anna?’
‘She’s my cousin.’
‘What’s she like?’
‘I don’t know her all that well. I think she was at a wedding I was at once. She’s OK. She’s just moved to Italy this year. Mummy said it would be nice to invite her because maybe she doesn’t have many friends here yet.’
‘I s’pose.’
He says, ‘I asked for a torch with different colours. There’s one that has blue and red and green as well as white.’
‘That’s a good present.’
‘I thought we could signal to each other. You know, at night.’
‘Your window doesn’t face the right way.’
‘I know. But the spare room does. It’s just across the hall from mine. My parents never notice what I do anyway.’
‘We could have a code.’
‘Or learn Morse code.’
‘Yeah.’
There is a zip of light across the darkness, but neither of us bother to point it out to the other.
‘It’ll be a good party,’ Jamie says. ‘I can’t wait.’
‘Me neither.’
It is late when the last image of the stars fades and the dark valley takes their place. The candle I have taken up has burnt down to a third of its original length, and the night air coming through the window is starting to be cooler. I rub my eyes, unstick the candle from its little pool of hardened wax, and go slowly downstairs.
Jamie’s party. His ninth birthday. It should have been nothing much, just a lot of kids having fun, balloons and birthday cake and presents. And it was all of these things, of course, but there was one thing also – one thing in particular.
But perhaps it’s not right to say that it was the party that was the fulcrum of change, because it is two days before that, on the road out of Altesa as I am coming back from buying sweets in the town, that I first see her. She is sitting under one of the lemon trees in the patch of scrub land opposite our house. Anna. This is my first image of her. Her face is turned away from me, a skinny ten-year-old girl, her jeans and T-shirt dusty from the earth on which she’s sitting.
She is plummeting like a stone towards water that is too far below her, and the air is frozen and on fire in my lungs as I watch her fall, unaware – or at least unafraid—
She is tying a bandage tight with hands dark with blood in the dusty afternoon light of an abandoned chapel, dust motes swirling in the air around her like a halo – a pietà—
* * *
She is naked by the open window, neon light from the street shaping her breasts and her hair, not caring – enjoying it—
She is sitting under a lemon tree, turned from me, watching a cat that is hardly more than a kitten play in the dry grass there. Her jeans are dusty with the red dust of the valley, and her T-shirt and her shoes too. I see her from the road. She sits oblivious to my presence, looking away from me, not yet even knowing that I exist in her world, or she in mine.
Chapter Five
England: a dark green carpet, a wooden train that I play with. The windows are tall and the curtains that hang from them come all the way down to the floor. Outside, behind the window, rain is coming down; the light is grey, and it feels cold.
England is still cold and grey when I am thirteen. The September air is dank and misty in the mornings, and it seems to rain constantly. It’s not even the fast, hard rain of the coastal storms back in Altesa, but a slow, penetrating, steady rain that looks like it will never let up. The weather is as grey and bleak as I feel in this place.
I tell myself, before I arrive, that because Jamie will be here with me, everything will be all right again; that somehow the strange distance that has come over us in the past year will be flushed clean away. It’s not true. We have left it too long. If only we had seen each other at Christmas and Easter, I keep sayin
g to myself, Christmas and Easter and the summer before – then maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. But it is.
So much has changed. I see Jamie – he’s there in the corridors, at meal times, at chapel in the morning. He doesn’t meet my eyes. He’s different now. Different on the outside: taller again, and his already dark hair has darkened further, and hangs in a kind of swatch over one eye. Different in other ways, too. When I go up to him on my first day here – try to talk to him – it’s like he doesn’t know me. His eyes are blank, and he hardly looks at me. Confused and upset, I let him be; and as I go, I hear one of the boys passing say, ‘Who’s that?’
‘Carlisle,’ Jamie says. ‘I used to know him.’
I used to know him. The words follow me all day, and wrap me in a cocoon of loneliness and incomprehension. So: this is England. This is the next five years.
My room, on the first floor of the house, is small and bare. I have unpacked my clothes and the few books and other things I have brought, but even though the room is small, they don’t seem to have made any impression on it. The walls are cream-coloured and spotted with the marks left by blu-tack from old posters. Jamie’s room is on the second floor with the other fourteen year olds: fourth-formers. I am a third-former. Sixth-form boys look like adults to me: except for their clothes, it’s difficult to tell them apart from the teachers. On my second day, reporting for a squash trial, I call the man in charge ‘sir’, and everyone laughs. He is not a man; he’s a sixth-form boy. I still can’t see a difference.
The week passes me by in a frantic haze of disjointed images and half-comprehended instructions. I am issued with books and paper and files, with timetables and a calendar and a fountain pen. The lessons are hard to follow, and people expect me to know things I don’t. I want to ask someone, but I don’t know anyone here. Not even Jamie.
When the weekend comes I am exhausted, but there are more lessons on Saturday morning. Before lunch is a double: an hour and a half which, my timetable tells me, is Art. At least I know where to go. I have seen boys coming out of this building with paint on their hands or streaks of clay on their trousers; it’s easy to work it out. When I arrive, I am slightly early.