‘Ethan’s schoolwork. It’s taken a dip recently, that’s all. Nothing major. It happens with most of them, the boys. From time to time. But we’re aware of it, and we’re working with Ethan to lift things. I can appreciate your concern, but I really...’
‘That’s not why I’m here.’
‘Oh. So...’
‘I am concerned if there’s an issue with his work,’ I said. I was also a little ticked that Kathy hadn’t mentioned it to me when she got back from yoga the night before. ‘But I wanted to talk about the bullying.’
‘Bullying?’
‘For the last week, maybe two, Ethan’s been talking about being bullied.’
Ms Reynolds swiveled to sit square in her chair. It was clear I’d got her full attention now. ‘If that’s the case then it’s a very serious matter,’ she said.
‘It’s the case.’
She frowned. ‘One of the teachers did notice a mark on his arm this morning. Very minor. It looked as though someone had gripped his arm. Is that what you’re referring to?’
Her eyes were on me. There was probably no way she could know that the mark, which I’d noticed myself when helping Ethan get dressed that morning, was the result of me shoving him into bed the night before. Not so very hard, but children’s skins are sensitive.
And my own father raised me to tell the truth.
‘No,’ I said. ‘That was me.’
‘You?’
‘There was a disagreement over getting into bed last night. I ended up guiding him into it.’
She nodded, a minimalist raise of the chin. ‘So then what are you referring to?’
‘One of the other boys has been picking on him. Muttering things in after-school swimming class, calling him stupid. Shoving him in the corridors.’
‘Ethan told you this?’
‘Yes. And this boy’s even threatened to throw Ethan out of a window.’
‘Throw him out of a window?’ Ms. Reynolds looked stricken. ‘When? When did this happen?’
‘Last Monday. And again yesterday.’ I’d forgotten, for the moment, that this threat hadn’t actually been made on Monday — only implied, intuited (or fabricated) by Ethan. It didn’t matter. Yesterday it had been said. ‘I’m not happy about this. At all.’
‘Well of course not,’ the headmistress said, putting her hands out flat on the table in front of her. ‘And who does Ethan say is doing all this?’
‘Arthur Milford,’ I said, experiencing heavy satisfaction as I handed up the name. Not merely at finally stepping up to the plate on behalf of my son, but also through disproving what Arthur had told Ethan — that it was only teachers who could do anything about a situation.
Learn this, you little shit: stuff that happens in the outside world also counts.
‘Arthur Milford?’
‘Yes.’
‘It can’t be,’ she said.
‘I’m sure he behaves perfectly when teachers are around.’
‘No, that’s not what I mean. I mean... we don’t have an Arthur Milford at this school. Are you sure that’s the name?’
‘Absolutely sure. I’ve heard it every day this week, including in the middle of Wednesday night, when Ethan had a nightmare about this bloody boy coming into his room and threatening him. Kathy’s heard the name too.’
The teacher looked baffled. ‘We did have an Arthur Ely in the school, a few years ago, who was quite big, and boisterous, but he left well before Ethan joined us. And there was a Patrick Milford, I think... Yes. He was here even before Arthur. But again, he’s moved on. There’s no Milfords here now. No Arthurs either.’
‘That’s the name Ethan used.’
‘I’m afraid... he may just have made it up. Or one of the other children did.’
‘What — and the fact there have been kids here with very similar names is just a coincidence?’
‘No. Making something up doesn’t mean it isn’t real. I know this is hard to hear, but... Their parents, everything out there in the world... They’re important, of course, you’re important. But still not as real to the children as what happens in here.’
I nodded, remembering the thoughts I’d had while sitting in the chair waiting, and how it had been when I was a child.
‘Facts, too,’ she went on. ‘Children get them muddled up. Or half-hear things. Or add two and two and make twenty eleven and a half. Perhaps Ethan got shoved by accident. Or he and another boy really getting on — or perhaps he’s having arguments with a someone who is his friend, really, and so Ethan doesn’t want to use the child’s real name. Children remember the names of those who have gone before. Perhaps they use them, too, sometimes. Like mythological figures. I spend all my working hours in this place, but it doesn’t mean I understand everything that goes on.’
‘So you don’t think anyone’s actually bullying Ethan?’
‘I sincerely doubt it — and not just because we do a lot to make sure that kind of thing doesn’t happen. None of the other boys or girls have said anything. None of the teachers, either. But trust me, I’ll look into it. The moment you’ve gone. And if there’s anything — anything at all — to be concerned about, I’ll call you right away. I promise.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. I didn’t know what to feel. A little foolish, certainly.
She stood up, and reached out her hand. I did the same, and we shook. ‘I hope I haven’t wasted your time.’
‘No time spent talking about a child is wasted,’ she said, and I felt a little less silly. ‘But do you mind if I offer a piece of advice?’
‘Go ahead,’ I said, assuming it would be some way of helping Ethan move past this, or of helping him to get his schoolwork back on track.
‘Do be careful about... the ways in which you have physical contact with your son.’
I froze, indignation and guilt melting together. The room seemed suddenly larger, and very cold. ‘What do you mean?’
She looked steadily at me. Her eyes were clear, and kind, and for a moment she didn’t looked like a teacher, or Ethan’s headmistress, just like a woman who meant well and cared about her charges a great deal.
‘I know what it’s like,’ she said. ‘What they can be like. I don’t have a child of my own, not yet, but I spend a lot of time with them. Which is why, every day after I leave here, I go to the gym and get it out of my system for an hour. I kickbox. I’m not very good, but boy do I give those punch bags a thump. And then I go home and have a gin and tonic that would make most people’s eyes water. That information is not for general consumption, okay?’
‘Okay,’ I said.
‘Loving children can be hard work. But it’s what we do. I know you love Ethan, very much. I’m just saying... be careful. Because of the assumptions others might make if they see a mark on him. And also because of how you feel, about yourself, and about how he’ll feel too. Boys need strong fathers. Men who are strong, and kind, not full of anger and guilt.’
I nodded, knowing she was right.
‘There’s evidently something going on in Ethan’s universe, and it’s good that I know. You did the right thing coming in to tell me about it.’
‘I hope so,’ I said, anxious now to lighten the mood. ‘Ethan said last night that’s it was okay to tell me about it, but teachers couldn’t know. Otherwise, Arthur would, you know.’
Ms. Reynolds smiled, and rolled her eyes, as she started to lead me toward the door. ‘The stuff that goes on in their heads,’ she said, with just the right amount of irony and affection.
I realized that I’d started to like Ms. Reynolds, and respect her, and that perhaps I’d start to take a more active role in Ethan’s schooling, and that would be good.
She walked with me out of the doors and to the waiting area outside. I had an hour to kill, and had decided to go find a coffee somewhere. To think through what had been said, to find a way of accessing a calm which must still exist somewhere inside me. To lighten up. To remember how to be strong, and kind.
‘You di
d the right thing,’ she said, once more.
As we shook hands again there was the sound of glass breaking, somewhere high above. We looked up and saw the third floor, and the broken window there. Saw the small, boy-shaped figure that came out of it, and started to fall.
Unnoticed
There is a homeless man downtown called Tony. Unlike many places in California, Santa Cruz is pretty tolerant of people without fixed abode, and so long as they don't hassle passers-by or smoke on the main street (it’s illegal for everyone, not just vagrants), the police tend to leave them be. Tony is in his early thirties, I guess, though it’s hard to be sure. His hair is long and matted. His skin is tan and weathered. His clothes are battered and very worn, but he does not smell bad. You see him around. Like many of the wanderers in downtown, if he diffidently asks for spare change toward a cup of coffee, a cup of coffee is what he’s got in mind. I gave him a dollar recently and later saw him on a side street, holding a Starbucks cup. He raised it to me in thanks. We wound up having a conversation, and after a while I went and bought him another coffee.
He told me his story. This is it.
One morning about three years ago Tony was over where he lived at the time, in a part of town called Live Oak, near Twin Lakes beach. Way back in the day the area had been agricultural land, smallholder chicken farms and tulip fields: now it’s a higgledy concentration of single-story houses and tidy trailer parks, plus a few multi-family units, leavened with pine trees and eucalyptus and spriggy cypress and palms. It’s like that on the inland side of East Cliff Drive, anyway: on the other, the block next to the ocean, you’ll find more expensive two-story houses and vacation rentals and a few family-friendly restaurants, generally Mexican in tone. Though it’s not as noticeably Latino as somewhere like Beach Flats down by the Boardwalk, if a passing truck spills loud music out of its windows in Live Oak then it’s almost certain to involve the enthusiastic use of trumpets.
On this particular morning Tony was returning to his house from the Windmill Cafe, the local coffee shop. He had his regular triple shot latte in one hand and was musing vaguely about what he had to do when he got home. Having recently lost a job in the coding mines over the hill — where he’d worked as a web programmer for a startup in Mountain View: the company’s recent buy-out by a social networking giant had panned out extremely profitably for the founders, though not so well for the employees who’d worked tireless hours toward precisely this goal — his task for the day was doing the rounds of online recruitment sites and forums and networks in search of someone who needed his skills in CSS and php. As more white folks around Silicon Valley know how to write these languages than can speak Spanish, he knew it wasn't going to be a walk in the park, but he was relatively unbowed by the prospect.
As he neared the corner with 14th he noticed a man squatted down by the entrance steps in front of a building on the other side of East Cliff Drive. The man was dressed in buff-colored shorts and white short-sleeved shirt and was peering in a this-needs-fixing kind of way at something that lay within a panel on one side. He reached into the space beyond and adjusted something, but was evidently not satisfied with the result.
It wasn’t an exceptional scene, merely the kind of non-event that forms the texture of small towns on sunny mornings, like the guy wheeling a trolley of water into the mercado or the woman from the taqueria hefting bags of trash to the dumpster. As Tony slowed his pace, however, it struck him that - despite having rented a house near this junction for nearly two years - he'd never seen anyone enter or leave the building. Also that, even though he walked past it every day, he'd never noticed anything about it whatsoever.
He took a moment to notice it now. It too was unexceptional. Quite large, two storeys high and about as wide as the small motel that stood opposite, on the side where Tony was walking. It was clad in pale grey siding. it had a lot of windows on both floors but all were obscured by vertically hanging plastic slats within. There was a parking lot on the right-hand side, holding a handful of cars. The building consisted of two wings joined by a longer chunk, which included the entrance beside which the man in shorts was crouching. This entrance had a kind of portico, leading to double glass doors. At the bottom of the stairs, Tony now noticed, was a stumpy concrete pillar. On this, presented without fanfare in dark blue Helvetica, were the words SYSTEMS SERVICE.
Huh, he thought. Hard to come up with a more anonymous name than that.
He hadn't come to a complete halt - there was little reason to in any of the above — but he had slowed down. The man by the entrance stairs stood, still looking down at whatever lay within the service panel, and then turned his head to look at Tony.
Tony nodded, and was surprised when the man didn’t nod back. The giving and receiving of affable salutations comes as standard in Live Oak, and most of Santa Cruz in general. It’s a neighborly place. The man had dark, somewhat curly short hair, a moustache, and was wearing - Tony now noticed — dark glasses.
Tony continued on his way, picking his pace back up to normal strolling speed. He took the turn into 14th, and then after a few yards, he glanced back.
The man was still looking at him.
That night, he and Klara having decided that while they were hungry neither felt inspired to cook, Tony found himself wandering back down the fifty yards to the taqueria on the corner. As was his custom, he came back outside to smoke and watch the street for the ten or so minutes it would take the busy women in the back to whip up his order of fish tacos and the shrimp burrito. He found himself looking once more at the building which stood kitty-corner. It struck him that in fact he’d walked close by it many more times than he’d realized. When he took his first cup of tea of the day to drink looking over the ocean each morning, he walked along its side. Still, somehow, without ever really noticing it.
He waited for a couple of cars to pass and trotted over to where the mercado stood. He looked across 14th at the side of the building.
Yes, of course: he semi-remembered it now. More grey siding, further windows, all dark. And behind...
He crossed the street. There was another car park behind the building here, much smaller than the one around the other side, big enough for maybe three vehicles at most. Then there was a wooden fence, and on the other side of this a garden area holding a few wooden chairs and a couple of tables with umbrellas. Tony had seen this kind of thing before, over the hill - forward-thinking tech companies providing alfresco meeting space to show how new-business and employee-friendly they were (though in Tony’s experience a meeting was still a meeting, whether you’re sitting outside or not).
After peering through the slats at the back of the building - which looked very similar to the front, with its bands of obscured windows - he walked back out onto the sidewalk and around to East Cliff Drive, and along the front. He wondered what kind of business would construct a building with so many windows, then obscure them all with hanging slats. Some kind of document storage facility, perhaps, where it was important things not fade due to sunlight? Maybe... but then why have so many windows in the first place? And would such a business have much need for meetings outdoors? What kind of discussions would take place there? “So, guys – let’s carry on keeping these documents really safe, okay?”
Tony stood in front of the steps leading to the portico. He knew his food would be ready by now, but he didn’t feel he was done yet. He walked up the stairs. The parking lot was empty, the windows were all dark, and it was after eight o’clock. It doesn’t matter if you know you’re only approaching in a spirit of idle enquiry, you can feel that you look suspicious walking up to a building which is closed for the night. He wasn’t even sure why he was doing it. Pure curiosity, he guessed.
The first thing he saw was an open space on the other side of the double glass doors. On the right was a reception desk. As he got closer and his relationship to the streetlight reflections on the glass changed, he noticed something else.
There was a car in there.
Not a small car, either. It was huge. And old.
He put his face close to the glass. The car was the size of a big SUV, but antique. It was mainly red, with gold and chrome highlights on the headlamps and running boards and along the sides and top of the windscreen. There was no roof. It looked like some glamorous touring vehicle from the 1930s, but in immaculate condition. Either someone had spent a long time lovingly restoring it or this car had been mothballed from the day it rolled out of the factory. Though it couldn’t have been stored here, of course, as the building which now housed it could only have dated from the 1980s, at the earliest.
Also... it was hard to see how someone could have gotten it in there. The lobby wasn’t large — there was only about four feet clearance around the car on all sides, which must have been notably inconvenient for the people who worked there and who presumably had to cross the space from time to time — but the main problem with the idea was the doors Tony now stood in front of.
He took a couple of steps back and assessed. You could maybe have got the car through them, just, if you removed the doors and were a driver capable of very, very precise steering. But then there was the matter of the stairs.
Tony glanced back. Four concrete steps. Could you drive a car like that up those, and through those doors? He sure as hell couldn’t have done, and wasn’t convinced anyone else could, either. Maybe... okay, maybe the car had been put in place earlier in the build, and they'd used a temporary wooden ramp before putting the steps in place, but that merely reinforced an idea he realized had already been growing in the back of his mind.
The car looked like it had been there first, and the building constructed around it.
A silly idea, of course — but even if it had merely been a matter of the ramp (and the more he considered it, the harder he found it to believe that the car could have been got in there up steps) it’d clearly been hella important to someone that the car be inside the building. Why? The business called itself SYSTEMS SERVICE, not “Cool Old Cars Restoration and Storage, Inc”. Having worked in Silicon startups for the previous ten years Tony was wearily familiar with excessively ‘characterful’ company founders, the kind that believed turning up to work on a boat-sized Harley or wearing rock-climbing gear in meetings might yield some kind of competitive advantage or at least put about the idea that they were really cool. But... putting a vintage car in a reception area barely large enough to take it? That’d take someone very determined to make their mark – and that kind of guy probably wouldn’t be running such an anonymous-looking business here at the quiet end of Live Oak.
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