The Lying Tongue

by Andrew Wilson

  “Probably all above my head, I’m afraid,” he said, wiping his dripping nose with the back of his hand. “Give me the thrill of a game any day. Doesn’t matter what it is—football, rugger, cricket, even rounders with the younger boys. Enjoy them all. Do you play?”

  When I told him I did not, he looked slightly disappointed in me, as if I had let him down.

  “Never mind. Anyway, what do you want me to do?”

  “I thought we could just start with a walk around the inside of the abbey. I know you told me you never really paid much attention, but seeing a few of the things may help jog your memory or whatever.”

  “Very well,” he said, wiping his mud-encrusted running shoes on the coir mat. “But I warn you, I don’t think I’ll be of much help.”

  We stepped inside the cold, damp building, silent except for the sound of our breathing. The weak, gray light cast the abbey in an eerie gloom.

  “To be honest, I only come in here when there’s a three-line whip that comes from the headmaster’s office,” said Levenson. “Never liked it, even as a boy. It gives me the creeps.”

  I took out my notepad and started to scribble down snatches of our conversation. I had to make it appear as though I was interested in his thoughts on the building and its collection. We walked through the archway, beneath the organ loft, and stopped by the treasury. I pressed the light to illuminate the glass panel.

  “Do you remember any of these relics having any particular impact on you when you were a pupil here?”

  Levenson looked down at the collection, the ivory triptych, the disintegrated cross, the pewter chalice, the ancient book, as if he’d never seen the objects before.

  “As I said, not much of an impact, I’m afraid. I was—still am, most probably—a terrible ignoramus when it comes to things like this. Sorry.”

  “Don’t worry, it’s no problem.”

  When the timer turned the light off, I didn’t bother to press it again. Instead, we carried on walking down toward the altar into the north aisle. As we turned to face the statue of the woman holding half a skull, Levenson appeared to shiver.

  “That’s the only thing that really made an impression,” he said, pointing at the sculpture. “That woman and that godforsaken skull. When I first arrived, some of the older boys used to talk about the curse of the screaming skull, how it was the skull of her lover, a man who had been murdered by her husband. All a complete fabrication, of course, but when you’re twelve and away from your parents, you believe any nonsense like that. Don’t get me wrong, I thought I was pretty tough, but that’s one thing that used to give me nightmares. Not much use to you, though, eh?”

  “No, no,” I said, busy scribbling away, “it’s fascinating. Exactly the kind of thing that I can use.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Good personal detail. Do you know if it affected any of your school friends in the same sort of way?”

  “Oh, it must have. It was one of those stories boys would start to tell after lights-out.”

  “And are you in touch with many of the boys you met then?” I said, turning to a page in my notebook where I had listed the names of the boys in the debating society.

  “No, not that many. A shame, really.”

  “What about…let’s see…Timothy Fletcher? David Ward?”

  “No,” he said, blinking.

  “Matthew Knowles?”

  He shook his head.

  “Jameson?”

  “No,” he said, trying to keep his voice under control.

  I took a deep breath, still pretending to read the names from my book, as though I had selected them completely at random.

  “Christopher Davidson?”

  His dark eyes seemed a shade darker. His fleshy lower lip twitched like a fat worm exposed to air.

  “And what about Gordon…Gordon Cra—?”

  As his hand whipped up onto my throat, I dropped my notebook onto the cold, hard floor. He pushed me against the statue with such force that my head hit the marble with an audible crack. His black eyes burned into mine with a fierce violence.

  “I don’t know what kind of game—”

  “You may have bullied those boys in the past,” I blurted out, suddenly amazed by my own forthrightness, “but you’re not going to bully me.”

  His grip tightened around my neck.

  “I know what you did to Christopher Davidson.”

  He seemed to freeze.

  “Drove him to his death.”

  His mouth gaped open.

  “And his father before him.”

  “What are you talking about?” he said, quietly, his grip on me relaxing slightly.

  “Chris’s diary. I’ve read it all. It’s all there. All about what you did.”

  “I don’t know what you are talking about,” he said, but it was obvious my words had resonated within him.

  As he let go of me, this great hulk of a man looked as if he were shrinking before my eyes. His shoulders began to droop down, his chest collapsed in on itself, and his legs appeared like they were about to give way. I had knocked the fight out of him, just with a series of little words, a couple of sentences about something that had happened years ago.

  “Look, you’ve got it all wrong.”

  “Not according to the evidence Chris left behind. And God knows what you must have done to those other boys.”

  “No,” he shouted, but then started to speak quietly. “No, really, it’s not how you think—at all.”

  At that moment we heard the door to the abbey bang shut and footsteps whisper across the floor.

  “We can’t talk here,” he said, looking around. “I haven’t been up to the tower in ages, but I think I have a key. It will be quiet up there, private. We won’t be disturbed.”

  From the pocket of his sweatpants he took out a large bunch of keys and sorted through them until he had found a small key, similar to the one Crace had used to open his letter box.

  “Yes, here it is,” he said. “Follow me.”

  I picked up my notebook and walked behind him to the organ loft. By the treasury he pulled back an old black velvet curtain to reveal a narrow stone staircase, which was covered by a latticework wooden door secured by a padlock. Using the key, Levenson unlocked the flimsy door, no more than a delicate crisscross of wooden slats, and started to climb the stairs that led to the tower.

  Hesitantly, I started to follow him up the staircase, my fingers brushing against the rough stone and centuries’ worth of accumulated dirt. A few twists of the stairway and the light from below faded away; a few more and it was almost pitch black.

  “Don’t worry, just follow me,” said Levenson.

  I guided myself up using my hands, occasionally grazing my knuckles against the hard stone. I heard something creak and the sound of Levenson breathing heavily as he tried to push himself through a trap door. From the top of the staircase I saw a slash of weak, gray light and felt the chill of a cold wind.

  “This way,” he said. “Here, let me help.”

  He stretched out his enormous, callus-hardened hand and pulled me upward, through the trap door and out onto the roof. He slumped back, breathing heavily. I stood up and walked along the roof, taking smaller and smaller steps as I neared the edge. The ground down below jumped up to meet me, and I stood back quickly, feeling dizzy. In the distance, I saw the tree-covered hills colored by the weak sheen of the last rays of the sun; the path from the school to the village clearly etched into the landscape; and, nearer to me, a few groups of boys slowly moving on the grass like black worms spilling their way across a stretch of lawn.

  “Before we start, I think you owe me an explanation,” said Levenson. “Do you want to tell me what you’re really up to?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s obvious you’re not really interested in all that shit about art.”

  I didn’t say anything for a couple of moments. Then I decided to take a gamble and tell him the truth.
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br />   “Very well,” I said. “I’m writing a book about Crace, a kind of biography.”

  “I see,” said Levenson. “I’d be extremely careful if I were you.”

  “Why?”

  “Haven’t you looked in a mirror?”

  I didn’t respond.

  “Isn’t it obvious? I mean, you and Davidson could be brothers.”

  “What of it? Probably just a coincidence.”

  “I don’t think so, somehow. I’d just watch your back if I were you. Seems odd to me.”

  “I’ll bear that in mind, Mr. Levenson. But I don’t think you need worry yourself.”

  He took a deep breath. “Crace…you think he merits a book then, do you?”

  “By all accounts it seems he led what could be described as quite a colorful life.”

  “Indeed he has,” he said, snorting with derision.

  “But I’d appreciate it if you kept the fact that I’m writing a book to yourself. It’s not something I would like to get around, just as I’m sure you wouldn’t like the headmaster and parents to know about your past.”

  “I had nothing to do with those boys’ deaths,” he said, his anger rising again. “Absolutely nothing. All right, I did bully Davidson, the stupid sissy that he was, and his pathetic father. But how did I know he suffered from depression? To me—and to the rest of the boys—he was just another inadequate, bumbling teacher who couldn’t control a classroom. I wasn’t the only one.”

  “So you are admitting to bullying.”

  “Well, yes, but only when I was a boy. It was stupid, and silly, and immature, and yes, of course I regret it now. You can’t imagine what it was like when I heard that he, Mr. Davidson, had killed himself. The headmaster told everyone it was a shooting accident gone wrong, but of course, Jameson and I knew the truth. Despite what you may think of me—despite what Davidson might have written in his diary—I’m not a complete monster. I went to pieces afterward. Yes, I tried to cover it up, probably played the tough man even more, but inside I was falling apart, especially when I…I…”

  Levenson coughed to clear his throat.

  “Yes?”

  “When I remembered that he’d seen us, Jameson and I, carrying that effigy, that Guy Fawkes, to the caretaker’s office. He came out of the music room and saw…saw it dressed in his jacket. We’d taken it from the back of his chair when he wasn’t looking. We thought he was going to go mad, start shouting, but he just went quietly back inside and closed the door. We thought that was hilarious and couldn’t stop laughing, congratulated ourselves on getting away with a fine prank, until, of course, we learned what had happened later.”

  He fell silent and looked down, ashamed of himself.

  “I see,” I said.

  “And after that I really did make an effort to be nice to Davidson. Well, not exactly nice, but at least not like I was before. I mean, although I wasn’t keen to begin with, we worked together on the debating society—”

  “Exactly. Now, that’s what I’d like to ask you about.”

  “Okay.”

  “You did know that Crace got the idea, the idea for his novel, from you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The fact that, as far as Chris describes it in his diary, you were in the classroom talking about, I think it was democracy, wasn’t it?” My words flooded out, almost too quickly to enunciate properly. “It must have been your first time there, after Crace had spotted you trying to bully Chris in the corridor, and you said you had an idea for a good debate, that you should put forward the motion that you should kill the headmaster. And Crace heard you and wrote it down in his notebook, and that idea formed the basis of his book.”

  He looked astonished, taken aback.

  “I can’t really remember one way or the other; it was so long ago. But if that was the case, good luck to him. At least he used me for that and not for anything else.”

  “Sorry?”

  I knew what he was going to say.

  “The reason why those boys killed themselves, the reason why Davidson killed himself—it was all the same thing. I’m telling you this for your information. What you do with it is up to you. You can put it in your book or whatever, I don’t care. Just as long as you don’t attach my name to it. Okay?”

  I nodded.

  “Right, then,” he said, taking a deep breath. “He was messing about with them. You know, abuse or whatever you want to call it. He chose his boys carefully. Always a particular type, sensitive, I suppose you’d say. Obviously knew better than to try it on with me, though.”

  Everything was beginning to make sense—awful, horrible sense.

  “And you knew this at the time?”

  “Oh, God no,” he said. “Of course not. None of us did. Only later, much later.”

  “How did you find out?”

  “It was Knowles. He told me about what had been going on, just before…before he died. We had kept in touch after leaving school. He’d gone off to university, and I was trying to make it as a rugby player. Too many injuries, not enough breaks, whatever the reason, I never made it, which is why I ended up back here. Anyway, we met up at a pub in London, he got terribly drunk, both of us did, and it all spilled out. I thought he was joking at first, but he was in a flood of tears, like he was having some kind of breakdown. It was terrible to see him like that. He said he had tried to forget about it, and seemed to have done so for a few years, but he’d just started going out with a girl at college and, well, the memories of it all came flooding back. I tried to help as best I could, but soon after that, that’s when I heard that he’d…he’d killed himself.”

  “How awful,” I said.

  “Yes, it was. And all because of that bastard Crace.”

  He spat out the name as if it were poison.

  “After Knowles’s death, I didn’t think anything more about it until I heard that Ward had killed himself and then Fletcher nearly ten years after that,” he said. “It was too much of a coincidence. All the boys were in Crace’s fucking debating society. I can’t believe none of us knew. Going on under our fucking noses, and none of us knew.”

  “How did it start? With Knowles, I mean.”

  “He told me that Crace had treated him as though he was his favorite pupil, encouraging him in his studies, giving him extra tutorials, promising him great things, that he would go to Oxford, how one day he might grow up to be a famous writer—all that crap! But Crace’s real intentions, they were different.

  “After Davidson died, Knowles said he had become increasingly depressed. The two, Chris and Matthew, had become close friends in the debating society, but Knowles had had no idea that anything was going on between Davidson and Crace. That night, when he was drunk and he told me all of this, he had said the worst thing was the fact he no longer felt special. Knowles hated Crace for what he had done to him, but he told me that he loathed him even more for betraying him. Fucking sick, isn’t it?”

  “Did he tell you anything about Chris? About how he had died?”

  “No, not really, except for the fact that after the funeral, Knowles went to see Davidson’s mother. During the course of the conversation, he asked her whether she had any idea why her son might have wanted to kill himself. She was obviously distressed— God only knows, the poor woman—and didn’t want to talk about it. But she kept repeating one phrase: ‘His life wasn’t his own anymore.’ The fucking pervert! I mean, I know I always thought Davidson was a bit wet, but to do that to him…”

  He walked over to the parapet, crouched down, and, as if to cleanse his mouth, spat into the darkness.

  “I think I’ve said enough.” He heaved himself up and turned to go. “And remember what I said—watch yourself.”

  I felt the pain the moment the back of my head came in contact with the water. I ignored the throbbing and the stinging, and eased myself down into the bath. The noise of the pub downstairs, the tinkling of the glasses and the occasional boisterous cry of one of the customers, disappear
ed as I slipped underwater. I closed my eyes and heard my heart beating inside me, a fast, irregular rhythm.

  I had started off if not exactly liking Crace, then at least feeling able to be amused by him. I respected his accomplishments, admired him for the purity of his vision, and looked up to him for his abilities to forge a strong, definite identity for himself, even if it was one that was slightly peculiar. But now—what did I think of him now? The revelation that he had taken me in because I had reminded him of Chris was one thing; finding out that he had been a serial abuser of boys something quite different. The thought that I had lived with him over the summer turned my stomach. The idea of him looking at me, his lazy, reptilian eyes preying on me, was disgusting. The way he touched me, his bony, etiolated fingers running up and down my neck, caressing my shoulder. Levenson was right. Crace was a fucking pervert.

  An image of Crace and a young blond boy flashed into my mind. Crace had a grip on the boy’s shoulder and was forcing him to spread his legs wide. The boy attempted to scream, but Crace clasped his hand over his mouth. I looked into the boy’s face. He looked like me.

  I pushed myself up and out of the water, gasping for air. It had been a daydream, nothing more than that, but it had seemed so real. I quickly soaped and rinsed myself, and then washed my hair. As I patted myself dry, using one of the damp towels the landlady had given me, I noticed there was a sheen of gray gossamer-like hairs covering my skin. The towel was completely covered in dog hair. The comic surreality of it all lightened my mood for a few moments until I remembered that I had, in fact, little to laugh about. I was writing a biography of someone who did not know what I was up to, someone who could cause a lot of trouble for me if he ever found out. My subject was not only mentally un-hinged but a criminal, responsible for the abuse and subsequent deaths of a number of his former pupils. And the most daunting prospect of all? I was due back at his palazzo in a matter of days.

  I sat down on the edge of the bath, feeling weak and anxious once more. What would happen if I gave it all up? After all, so far my research had given me nothing but trouble. I had found myself in a number of situations that had necessitated a great deal of quick thinking on my part so as to prevent exposure. I thought about the little episode with Shaw and remembered what I had so nearly done. I knew my history, my own potential, and realized that I had to avoid any form of stress. And yet what was I doing?