“Who is this?”
Still I say nothing.
Then, her voice shrinking to a whisper: “Nick?”
I thumb the red button to break the connection and breathe out and quickly breathe in again. I watch as Helena Swan turns away from the phone and stares into the air in front of her face, which looks as if it has just been slapped. I wish at that point I hadn’t done what I have done, in spite of the information gained from it.
I asked Nick once if he was frustrated by the confusion surrounding the use of black and white sequences in If . . . ., for the most part a colour film. Every commentator seems to have a different take and all claim to be reflecting the position of director Lindsay Anderson. Some say it was done to save money, others that a consistency of colour tone in the chapel, with its great stained-glass windows, could not be achieved. Still others argue that the choice was aesthetic, that it had to do with reminding the viewer of Anderson’s links to Free Cinema, that it was part of a general push for Brechtian alienation, that it was intended to heighten the tension between fantasy and reality.
“It’s all of those things and none of them,” he’d said. “Art’s impossible without ambiguity.”
4 May 1997
Standing at a urinal in our school, but in Scotland. A man stood too close to me so I moved along and he muttered that the only person I’d have something to worry about in that department would be Ian somebody. I challenged him. He shook water at me, which I soon realized was his piss. I grabbed him and demanded to know his name and where he worked – Iain Grant, lab technician, he said. Somehow I knew they were two different Ians and that this one spelled his name the Scottish way.
When I get back home, I pour myself a large glass of wine and watch the film again. Every shot of the school reminds me of the one Nick and I both attended, he five years ahead of me. A couple of years ago there was a reunion. It was the last opportunity to visit the school, as the governors had finally admitted defeat in a long battle against time and announced that the school would move to new premises at the beginning of the next academic year. I asked Nick if he was going.
“Am I fuck.”
I went; I was curious. You were supposed to get a boy to show you around, but I slipped up the back stairs and prowled the upper corridors on my own. I wasn’t hugely keen to catch up with old faces and was attracted more by the fabric of the building itself. There were textures and shapes I had forgotten, but which came back to me with startling clarity once I saw them again after two decades. The painted notice boards pierced by thousands of pin holes. The grey plastic roller doors on boys’ lockers outside classrooms.
The swimming pool was unrecognizable. Gone were the cold, green tiles, the constant drip of freezing water from the concertina glass ceiling. The pool had always been my most hated part of the school, even after optional wearing of trunks was introduced half-way through my time there. Until I was fourteen or fifteen all boys swam naked, and all boys found it humiliating and degrading. Mature adolescents, late developers – I was never sure which subset found it more embarrassing.
In the refectory I saw Corky – Mr McCorkindale, games master – and felt a sudden jolt of discomfort. I hovered on the edge of a group of old boys to overhear the conversation between them and Corky, who looked older (obviously), but also considerably smaller, than I remembered him. I already knew that he had left teaching, and I heard him say he had retrained as a psychotherapist. One of the old boys burst out laughing. Corky laughed, too, but then asked what was funny.
“Well, you created your own client base, didn’t you?” said the former pupil. “With the school’s policy on swimwear.”
We could see the funny side now, but it had been nothing to laugh about at the time. Some had got over it, others were left with intimacy issues. I know one old boy turned Sunday league footballer who has never felt comfortable showering with his teammates after a game. I just can’t get naked in front of other men, he told me, paraphrasing Woody Allen. Not a problem I’ve ever had.
Nick never asked me about the reunion and I didn’t volunteer anything. Part of me wanted to tell him that I had tried the door at the back of the school theatre, but that it had been locked.
Rewatching If . . . . reminds me of the importance of Bobby Phillips. Not only do he and Wallace share a bed but the younger boy finds himself up on the roof with Mick, Johnny, Wallace and the Girl at the end of the film, bristling with guns and ammunition. A loaded gun won’t set you free? Depends who you’re pointing it at.
Sunday, 31 October 1999
[Halloween.] I was back at school. The corridors and great hall were familiar, but everywhere there were orange plastic girders and supports appearing to hold up the ceilings. I knew these would be unsuitable to bear any loads, yet they could have no other use that I could fathom.
The film has given me no clearer idea how to find Nick. From my bag I take out the books I borrowed from his shelves – a short BFI monograph on the film and his copy of Your Face Here, which falls open at page sixty-four and the paragraph about Rupert Webster and Richard Warwick. I have a look at the chapter on If . . . . and then the BFI book, by Mark Sinker, which is intelligently written and packed with ideas and different approaches to interpretation. I notice that Your Face Here records the location of the motorcycle showroom, from which Mick and Johnny steal the motorbike they drive to the Packhorse Cafe, as being in South Wimbledon, whereas the BFI book and other sources, both print and internet, maintain it’s in Shepherd’s Bush. I look up Your Face Here on Amazon and am interested to see it has nine five-star reader reviews, all posted by “A Customer”. None of them goes into much detail. On a hunch, I Google Richard Warwick: died at the age of fifty-two with a form of dementia brought on by AIDS. For Rupert Webster, however, I find a couple of sources claiming he’s still alive. Either Anderson or McDowell spread a rumour that he’d been killed, they said. The internet is notoriously unreliable and it’s only sentimentality that makes me place more trust in the printed page. I don’t know what to believe, but I do hope that the boys who wrote Your Face Here, a lively and enjoyable read, are wrong and that Rupert Webster, who for a short time forty years ago was Bobby Phillips, is alive.
More to the point, I hope Nick is alive.
I’m narrowing down my options. I realize I have to do something I should have done days ago.
I grab my stuff and leave the house.
The building containing Nick’s flat is only a couple of streets away from Helena Swan’s house. I’m wondering if she knows this, as I tell a resident on the top floor I’m delivering pizzas. The door clicks open while he’s still asking his girlfriend if they’ve ordered any.
Sunday, 27 November 2005
Looking through old copies of the school newspaper, I see one with a picture of a girl on the front page. I recognize her, but the name given – something Schneidor – is not familiar. There are pictures of me, black and white, milking the applause from a huge crowd. There are other pictures of crowds on the fields at the front of the school, among them a young Mike, looking at me and waving. He moves as the picture comes to life.
I’ve never been to Nick’s place – he’s never invited me – but I know he lives on the first floor. There are two doors on the first landing. The one on the right has pounding music coming from within, so I knock once on the door on the left, wait a moment, then lean my shoulder against it. I feel it give very slightly, so I treat it to a shove, then another, and I’m inside. I push the door to behind me and lean against it as I wait for my heartbeat to return to normal.
Straight ahead is a tiny bathroom, to the left of that an equally small bedroom. Facing the bedroom is a combined kitchen and living room. The size of the flat, a professional would be able to toss it in two minutes and leave with either what they came for or the knowledge that it wasn’t there to be found. I’m not a professional, but I do know Nick. I check out the bookshelves. More film books. Novels about cinema: Flicker, Throat Sprockets, The House
of Sleep. A Halliwell’s Film Guide. I take it down and look up If . . . ., which Halliwell appears to admire but still attacks for its “fashionable emphasis on obscure narrative”, concluding that “the film as a whole makes no discernible point”. Halliwell just couldn’t help himself.
On the next shelf down are copies of Nick’s books. His studies of Westerns and Eastern European SF and fantasy cinema for Wall-flower Press and the experimental novel that was published in a limited edition by a local independent outfit. There are not many of us who have read it.
There’s a decent-sized plasma-screen TV, but nothing leaps out at me from Nick’s collection of DVDs and tapes, and there’s no sign of a laptop (and no room for a desktop). The bedroom is dominated by an unmade double bed, on the far side of which a fat, well-thumbed notebook sits on a little set of drawers. It appears to be a dream diary. I flick through it and read random entries.
24 January 2006
In school, towards the end of the day, I find myself near an empty staircase leading up, so I go up, thinking I’ll just have a look around. I end up in a maths classroom full of small boys. The uniform is different and there are variations. I see one boy in a tight-fitting blazer and trousers that’s very dark grey with silver symbols in a regular pattern all over it. The boys are getting up to go. I want to leave before them. I pass the teacher who has grey hair and who I think I recognize from my time at the school. He has his back to me. Then I’m looking for the door and I can’t find it. Finally I do, but it’s hidden and to get through it you have to push drapes aside and step over a threshold of broken bits of wood – it feels like a trap.
They’re not all about school, but enough of them are.
I put the notebook back down. On an impulse I open the top drawer and immediately wish I hadn’t.
I was going to hail a cab, but when I get back to Palatine Road there’s a bus coming, so I stick my hand out. I imagine everyone on the bus can see the way my jacket is weighed down on one side, but I doubt I’m the first person to catch the forty-three bus with a loaded gun in his pocket. I wonder how he got hold of it, though when I think about it, there must be a hundred ways to get tooled up in Manchester these days.
I get off a couple of stops early and walk. I haven’t been back since the reunion. The fence by the old biology block never was much of a barrier. I approach the main buildings from the side – much less conspicuous than using the front entrance. I don’t know what plans exist for the disused school. Demolition and a highly lucrative land sale, I presume. For now it stands empty. I enter via the ramp down to the basement on the west side. One of the double doors at the bottom opens at my touch. If the signs posted by a security company are anything other than an empty threat, I’d be surprised. I pick my way past a line of toilets, not a single door remaining, broken glass on the concrete floor flashing in the weak light of my mobile phone. I climb the stairs to the corner of the maths and geography corridors, where I stop and listen. All I can hear is the thumping of my heart and a steady drip-drip-drip somewhere behind me.
I creep past the Great Hall and main stairs. The shadows are grainy, alive with glittering motes. I hesitate outside the Masters’ Common Room, the smooth stones of the corridor floor carpeted with white dust and flakes of paint. In the theatre, the individual wooden blocks that make up the parquet floor are all loose. The door at the back is no longer locked, but Nick is not inside. I enter a room I have not been inside for almost thirty years, at least not outside my dreams. Night after night, sometimes, for several days at a time, I have found myself back here. Twice, at the most, we were here together, but in my mind the narratives of those two occasions have become intertwined with the many, many times I have dreamed myself back. If the closest I can get to Nick in reality is sharing duties and an office, in my fantasy life we have remained locked into an infinite variety of positions on two turquoise vinyl-covered chairs pushed together as a makeshift couch in this tiny room – props cupboard? Wardrobe department? – at the back of the theatre. The first time, early May 1980, he had a little Philips cassette player and a badly recorded tape of bass-heavy music, dark and threatening, but utterly compelling. I asked him what it was and he smiled as he said it was called Unknown Pleasures. Even with the unsophisticated musical tastes of a twelve-year-old, I could tell it was special. The way the drummer played just off the beat, the fact that the bass player carried the melody more often than not. Nick described the singer to me, told me he suffered epileptic fits, sometimes during performances.
When he touched me, it felt both wrong and right at the same time, but he was tender and patient. I liked his smile and the smell of his neck. When he held my face with his hands and kissed me, I imagined the east and west wings of the main school building somehow wrapping themselves around this tiny room at the back of the theatre and keeping us safe.
The second time, just before the Whit week holiday, Nick told me that the singer from the band had killed himself. He played the album again and we sat in the dark listening to it, the lyrics scattered with clues that should have foretold the singer’s suicide. Nick also told me about a film he had seen on television just over a year ago in which four schoolboys and a girl staged a bloody revolution at their boarding school, shooting the headmaster and killing dozens of pupils and teachers. We’re in that film, he told me. You and me. One day you’ll see it and you’ll see what I mean.
As I reach out an arm to steady myself against the wall, I feel the weight of the gun in my pocket.
I re-enter the auditorium and head for the swing doors that lead back to the main corridor. The eroded hollows in the steps cushion my footfalls as I climb the main stairs. The upper corridors are lit by moonlight. I stop and look out across the quad towards the windows of the adjacent corridor where a moving figure catches my eye. The pale, wide-hipped body, silvery white hair. Black holes for eyes. I don’t need to be any closer to know that Helena Swan is playing Mrs Kemp, which would place Nick most likely at the end of her corridor at the junction with mine. I keep walking, the weight of the gun tugging at my right shoulder.
When I reach the junction of the two corridors, Nick is not there. I figure he’ll be halfway up the next one, so that in a moment he can have Helena Swan walk away from him and look back, just as Mrs Kemp does. I doubt he’s gone to the trouble of bringing a camera, but am aware that if I approach now I will ruin his shot. So be it.
He steps out from behind a bank of lockers twenty yards away.
“I wondered when you’d come,” he says.
Helena Swan falters and stands still, uncertain how to react.
“You shouldn’t be walking around with that in your pocket,” Nick says calmly. “Give it to me.”
I take the gun out of my pocket. Helena Swan, on seeing the dark shape in my hand, turns and runs towards the far end of the corridor.
“Who is it for?” I ask.
Nick smiles. “You brought it,” he points out.
“I couldn’t leave it in your flat with the door off its hinges,” I say. “But if I give it to you, I’m worried you just might use it. Whether here and now or next week at your conference, in a dramatic re-enactment of a certain film.”
“‘One man can change the world with a bullet in the right place’,” he says, quoting Mick Travis. “I’m not sure I can face that conference. All those academics.”
I remain silent, thinking. He has a secret he can’t live with. I am it.
“So,” he says. “Stalemate.”
Slowly, I bend at the knee and place the gun carefully on the floor. I straighten up and place the toe of my shoe against the mouth of the barrel and give the gun a gentle kick so that it slides several yards along the corridor to a position roughly halfway between us.
“Indeed,” I say.
ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE
Alexander McCall Smith
1
MICHAEL MOVED EMPTY-HANDED into the house in Belfast. Most people have at least the contents of a small van to move in; he
had nothing, just a suitcase, and not a large one at that.
It was not that he was poor. His bank account, although not over-full, was solvent, and he had a reasonable amount stashed away. The lack of possessions was a temporary state – brought about by an entirely amiable divorce.
“You can have the lot,” he said to his wife. “I really don’t need to take anything.”
She had tried to persuade him otherwise. “But you can’t give me everything,” she said. “You need to take something. What about some pictures?”
But he had grown tired of the pictures, and if he removed them, he pointed out, there would be squares of discolouration on the walls and she would need to call in the decorators.
Such generosity, she said, was typical of him. “You’re such a kind man,” she said. “It breaks my heart to see you go. It really does.”
And he replied. “It breaks mine too. But there we are. We’re different, aren’t we? And I want you to be happy.” To which she replied that she wanted him to be happy too.
She took his hand in hers. She should not have fallen in love with that other man, but she had, and she realized that she loved him more than she loved Michael. And he was unhappy in London; he would do far better to return to Belfast.
“You never really liked London, “ she said. “You never settled, did you?”
He shook his head. “It’s nothing to do with Londoners.” (She was one.) “It’s just so large and the . . . and the very air is sixth-hand. Or that’s what it feels like.”
She had sniffed, without really thinking; air was air. “The smell of home,” she said to him.
“I want to go back to Belfast,” he said. “I miss it. Everything about it, I miss. Black Mountain. The lough. The red brick. The pubs. Everything.”
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