Remember what?
She spins, pages float to the floor.
A quest, Yank, didn’t I say quest? Don’t waste time . . . Brickie picks up a book from Betts’ desk . . . You’re pathetic. Do I have to show you?
She gathers up the spilled papers, replaces them on a desk covered with letters, notes, bits of bark. Two red berries. Still life of Apple Core, slantingly cubist Sandwich Crusts on Foil.
What’s his story?
Who, Betts?
He’s unhappy.
Aren’t they all . . . Brickie flips pages distractedly.
Brass ashtray in the shape of a palm. Offering Greek coins, string. Catarrh pastilles. Cuff link. Jade dot. Clipping a young cuff as he raced across the Oxbow quad. To his wedding. Marjorie in white. Smooth to the touch. She zips the delicious dot into her moneybelt. Sifting letters on his desk. Yellowing Dear fellows Much encouraged to know the school’s behind me on this lark, not like on that mad canoe down If the gerries ever In an airlift with an O.M. Hughes several weeks back Used to snore through Latin with Berger Send over more Monsteadians, not many are used to these conditions
Brickie outlined at the window, Certain it was this one bastard eyes scanning dark eyes dark
Brick—
Shut up, Yank.
Yes, dark Heart. A black chapel gown hangs behind the door, deflated crow. Brickie still at the window. Unhooking the gown, the slippery black of chapel, collar sheened to purple by his hairoil and the betrayal of mind betrays me his sleeves hang long past her hands I run across the quadrangle I delve the fog I am
Not as bad as you might be at the English Language.
Brickie looks up . . . Idiot.
Grim reaper.
He tips the book toward her, pointing to a photograph.
Stokes?
Yes . . . Brickie says . . . And he’s got both his eyes. But down here’s the good bit. Your father—
A noise. Shadow in the doorway. They freeze. Betts. He looms, he enters.
Quickly, she slips off the gown, kicking it into a shadow.
Well, he says, well well what have we here a pile of mischief the American girl the boy from London in places where they should not be rifling through the belongings of a teacher. And my notes do they amuse? Or do they mean so little as to mean nothing? Am I simply another figure knocking about, lost to a better past, meting out the old grey matter in this blighted setting?
Betts walks to the window, holds his hands to the radiator beneath it ... Out there’s where you two belong, isn’t it? Isn’t there some hockey some rugger—
Don’t play rugby here sir, on account of—
Don’t patronize me, Brickman, I know there’s no rugby here and there hasn’t been for years . . . Betts considers the playing fields, quietly . . . There was a time before girls. We were a serious school then.
Zipped at her waist, his round cuff link presses the point. The three of them stare below at figures in grey zagging purposefully around the field. The window rattles. Cue thunk of ball, a solitary shout.
Betts turns . . . Why are you going through my possessions as if they’re trifles?
Sir, she asked about her father. I meant to show her the book where—
Brickman, do you intend to make absolutely nothing of yourself? Is that your objective?
Brickie shrugs.
Don’t the two of you have enough to do don’t I for one give you enough Prep have you revised for the test on Monday? Do you know the meaning of the words Husbandry, Capitulate or Thews? For you clearly understand Defile, and you have provided ample definition of the word Sully . . . Betts leans back on the radiator, the window behind him rations light . . . Ten sides. Both of you. On the subject of history. You seem to share a fondness for it.
Ten sides, sir, not really fair.
You’re absolutely right, Brickman. Let’s make it fifteen.
10
Détente?
Stop for a moment.
A relaxing of tension between rivals.
I have to open the window.
Thews? It’s freezing.
Sit on the radiator then.
It burns. Thews?
Don’t flash me, Yank I’ve no interest in your underthings.
Muscular power or strength.
I knew that one. Tell me—
Desist?
About Paul.
Desist, Brickie.
I won’t.
Husbandry?
Don’t care.
Indolence will—
Why did you go out that night?
We have insular lives here, that being. What night?
Drop the sham. I know what happened last term.
How would you know?
I can keep a secret. But I have a theory, that being a speculation or assumption—
A proclivity toward—
That you wanted Paul to attack you.
Wanted? Maudlin?
Did you?
Calumny, that being—
Damaging talk about another. Answer me.
Don’t be stupid. The consequences seemed—
Abstract?
Yes, muddy.
Actually, it’s Without Reference To A Specific Instance.
I thought I had to do it or I would always hear him, think about him.
It was your own despair you went for. What are you doing?
Radiator’s hot. Desultory?
I give up.
Disconnected, random. Oligarchy?
Obstinacy, no routine, no idea.
Ruling by a very few.
Betts, for example.
Exactly. Sully?
To rifle through the belongings of another? To mar or defile part of the school’s heritage?
I wouldn’t put that on the test.
Might, to watch him detonate.
It’s time that you Clarify, Brickie, that is inform.
But you failed to find it.
And this is where you tell me.
What now?
Yes.
Say you can’t do it alone.
I can’t do it alone.
But you don’t really believe that.
I would have found out.
Not without trouble. Don’t believe me? Then you haven’t really seen trouble. If I have to tell you, well, it’s a matter of our background yes history a matter of trouble encountered years ago in black and white.
Go on.
Certain?
Yes.
If you’re ready for the blood, the scene of us revising vocabulary in Follyfield 4 dissolves to show a boy—
TELL ME.
Stokes has one eye.
Yes, yes.
Your father took the other.
Go to hell.
There was a gun—
Prevaricator. Mendacious—
Ambassador saw it all.
He was wrong. A case of mistaken identity.
Why didn’t Cyclops go to Wales? He was in hospital, bleeding out his eye.
My father did not shoot Mr. Stokes.
Come back, I haven’t finished. I am undone, arrested, partial.
Partial to insanity.
Your father, mine, Stokes, Chambers, an accidental meeting on the playing fields. The night, you see, the night was dense with fog—
Day, Brickie. It must have been day.
Day, then. How about evening?
Alright, evening.
It was grey as coal that evening years ago when the boys met over by the copse, a winter evening wherein the moon—
Not full.
It’s my story. Half a moon was beginning to rise, an early moon, so the effect was the ending of a stormy day, half a pellucid moon oh shut up, a thinnish moon then, not giving enough light for say, silhouettes. Armand Stokes, seventeen, kneels to grind out his cigarette in the damp ground.
Cyclops doesn’t smoke.
Well he did back then. Anyway, he’s been waiting for Teddy Evans. Stokes has sent Mercury to fetch the lad. There he
comes, young Evans on the horizon.
Horizon?
Stokesy’s butting out his CIGARETTE, we see the moon gleam off the silver—
Gleam?
—of a trigger.
It’s not dark.
Horror, for a rifle—
How could it gleam in the evening?
Shut up.
Well, get it right.
Doesn’t matter. Stokesy’s got a rifle and Teddy’s by his side. Evans, Stokes says, It’s like this. I’m seventeen and about to be conscripted and this is a matter not about courage or the country’s honor let’s not question whether or not I’m crapping myself about going over what I want you to do is take this and shoot me in the leg make me that is render me incapable of going over. Teddy Evans, hair wild, manner insubordinate—
Brick—
—begins to walk away. Oh no, he says, a moral lad he, I will have nowt to do with this.
Nowt?
Well he says something with a Welsh flair and begins legging it over the field. Without thinking it through, young Stokes, the same Stokes now our Head and spiritual leader, hefts the rifle up to his shoulder. But what’s this, up from behind a knoll, Ambassador and Chambers back from a smoke. Against the backdrop of the school, what do they see. Your father. Stokes with a gun aimed at him. Then. Boom.
Cyclops shot my father?
It’s true. And the bullet. Speeding through the air toward your father, the bullet checks the angle Stokes has given it. Angle of a man with unsteady aim. The bullet peels away and strikes a lawn roller leaning against the cricket pavilion. Bullet ricochets off the metal. Heads straight back whence it came. Hello. No time for Stokes to think or duck. The bullet bows, Pardon me, may I have that eye?
Stokes aimed for my father—
Blood everywhere. I should think. Spattered, dripping.
It’s a bad story, Brickie.
Your father had a fondness for the old pavilion?
I never told him it burned down.
Well, Stokes didn’t serve, so his plan worked. Cost him, though. Half the world. Fool.
But imagine, and your imagination’s being tested, old Cyclops as a crack shot. Boom. No Father, no you.
11
There was a dog and birds. Gwydyr in winter like an apple. That cold. Or the smell reminded me.
Hamey, you left me too.
I drank with Americans on the train back. They’d give you as many cigarettes as you wanted. Reason enough to immigrate. I taught them songs. I had songs, you just had to ask. Dirge. Latin. Hymn. Drinking songs. I had learned a few at Monstead.
And before I walked back that muddy track home to where my father waited with his unreading eyes, I stopped by The Plough. A man remembered me and bought me a drink. Cheapskates faked amnesia. I couldn’t understand what people were singing. Fell off my stool after not too long. Sprained or twisted my knee and could barely manage the door alone. A woman with yellow hair offered me her arm, then her home. Thought I’d better convalesce, bear myself up for the reunion with Da. The lady was about forty, or so she seemed at seventeen and four pints. She may have been younger. She may have been twenty-five or eight. Edna. Edith. It’s not the passage of time playing tricks on my memory, for it is sharper now than ever, in fact I clearly recall that I couldn’t remember her name the next morning. She had a parakeet and I was reminded of the time my friend Hamey Rhys-Jones-Llwelyn ate a woman’s bird. This one was blue, named Popeye. I pressed my face against the cage to measure my mouth against it. I was never the type for a grand gesture, eating birds. Legends. Mam had legends, from her days of drinking and a handbag she had with fur on it. Thick suede or. Like a little dog. She called it Rudolph. Telling Da, I’ve got Rudy, clutching the rank mat to her chest as she went to meet Mrs. O’Brien who was Irish but had a cousin who lived in America. It was always America she wanted back to. During the course of the night Mam’d forget where she was and set the bag down in a thickening puddle of stout or vinegar or piss. Rudy. There were stories Rudy got up and barked, saved Mam from falling in the river. But I’m no good at writing it. Words have never been friends. Mam an American living in Wales saying her a’s wrong until the day she left. I went to school a Welsh-American, served time in England, then to the border for the war. I don’t know which words belong where. I confuse dystopia with dyspepsia. And whereas I suppose one might result in the other, these mistakes won’t take you far in academic circles. I never know if I’m being understood. I check myself even when I’m making sense, amalgamation amalgamation is that what I really mean?
When I woke up in the bed of Edith or Edna, there was nothing to tell me how we had spent the night. Conjugally or not. I assumed it was because she had the bread under the grill and sausages half unwrapped as I bolted out the back. Had it been a year later, I would have stayed for the sausages.
Da unstuck himself from the Bible to cut me some bread. The house was as I’d left it eight years earlier. He said I had English vowels. That’s enough to curb your hunger. Said he wished he had written more which was unusual in that he couldn’t write. We sat down. I had a few Do you remembers . . . ? I knew Da was pretending he did. I made some up for a test. At those he laughed the hardest. It was difficult to understand how he fared during my years away. And the war. That is if he even knew about it. I’m not one to make my own father out to be simple. Avoidance. I prefer that term. There was no one to say that Da had not moved from in front of the fire, first wood, then gas, the years I’d been at Monstead. And there was no one to say he hadn’t been enjoying the company of an Edith or Edna all this while.
He didn’t remember Rudolph. I knew it was somewhere in the house. She would have taken only the best things back to America, the dress she came in, her mousecloth shoes. Not a dirty Welsh dogbag answering to Rudolph. But the house was too small to hide it. You always found what you were looking for in Gwydyr. No one had a house big enough for secrets.
She would have a big white place of secrets in America.
Da couldn’t cook, I had to help him even with breakfast. I would have asked, what have you been living on these years? But he might have answered, I haven’t been at all. I’ve said it before, I’m no good at writing it.
Would ya marry me?
I left the sausages to blacken around the edges. But I let Da tell me how he wanted the eggs. That’s all the same to me, he said. I told him I hear you, though I didn’t know what exactly was the same as what. Home. Holding my words on the tongue a moment to fuzzy them. Instead of what I found at Monstead, to spit words out pearls. Or turds.
Would ya marry me, I said inside my head again and again. Was it a song I’d heard over the radio, on the bus. I don’t know. It was a refrain stuck in my head. Would ya marry me? I proposed to myself, something I put to the trees while I smoked. Please do.
You know Latin now do you, Teddy? Da said. Yes. Well then, he said, You can read the Bible to me because I haven’t been able to these years your mother’s been gone and I didn’t say your Bible’s English. I said, That I will, Da. But I was prone, forgive me I was seventeen, returning to a place I might have outgrown, I was prone to inserting short diatribes against religion, if you can measure it against philosophy, I said, And I think you can. Does God exist? I was seventeen.
Would ya.
My speech couldn’t find itself again, once you’ve heard yourself a foreigner, your voice stays strange.
If I was in The Plough telling stories, thinking I was home again, suddenly a fellow would turn quiet. Scotch is it? But if he knew me from being a child, it would be, You’ve spent too long away, Shed. And the ensuing sport would be to relate favorite English atrocities. Who can blame us, you always need a goat to send into the woods. Take the attention off yourself.
The war was over.
I was seventeen.
On my way back to Edna’s, I stopped to rip up hawkweed, tethering the stalks with a bootlace. Just because a woman has yellow hair and took advantage of you without too much provocation on
your part, there was no call to walk away with her toast under the grill, the sausages half unwrapped. There was an obligation for the politeness your mother brought you up with, at least until the age of nine when she departed for her home country of America to find the man she really loved, the man married to a woman who was not she and the man himself she really loved, not your father. There was a need for that kind of consideration.
Would ya. Would ya.
Don’t need rumors haunting you on your first visit home. Rumors you left some woman with uncooked toast. That won’t do, as Mr. Mortimer used to say. No no no boy, that won’t do at all.
She came outside, standing at the top of the stairs. Hello, I said, waiting on a name until I was certain. What do you want? in her dressing gown and a pair of boots, hair all triangles. I felt a sudden fondness, her hair rebelled in the night the same as mine. Did she have similar difficulties taming it in the morning? I would ask over tea, while she grilled breakfast. Sausages I hadn’t stayed for. Toast. Homemade jams, certainly. Marmalade if I was lucky. Morning. I held the flowers to one side. But then, I dared not move, there was such a black look on Effie’s face. Granted it was early, for the visit was an idea which gripped me upon shaving, a ritual I had not undertaken, it should be noted—for fear of painting an inauthentic portrait—since my arrival home. I was more inclined to spend an hour attacking breakfast and, depending on how I felt about the day, questions of man’s ascent or descent. But this particular morning I had risen early, as much out of guilt as any sense of propriety, for my father was still working at the age of fifty-two, and over the shaving bowl, I was struck by the necessity of a call, an apologetic call, on Miss Effie. So there I stood at the bottom of the steps in the early morning, charmed by her crooked hair. The black look remained. It took some minutes to digest that the great muddy boots she had slipped into undoubtedly belonged to a man. And by the looks of it, a man two and a half times my size.
Schooling Page 20