The Rye Man

by David Park

  When both schools had got off the bus and formed into their groups they set off up the incline, only to come running back when they realised they needed to extract information from the site map at the boundary wall. He watched Jacqueline trailing her group at a safe distance and it jarred to think that within a few minutes the two children from the other school would discover what her fellow pupils already knew. He hoped they would be kind but it was only a slim chance. Perhaps he should not have put her into a group and instead got her to stay with him, but no matter what way he might have organised it, the end result would have been the same.

  Under a grey, flat sky the children scampered up the slope towards the concentric circles of dry stone walls, whose surfaces were blotched and whitened with weathering. He hoped they would not be disappointed by what they were finding – lines of stone, like rows of blackened teeth, the skeleton of the church and the stump of the round tower. It needed imagination to construct a living image from the paucity of the remains, and that was a skill which they found increasingly difficult when everything in their world came to them complete and instantaneous. But as he watched them it was obvious that the game element of their exploration held their attention as they whirled about the site like dervishes, the wind flapping open unbuttoned coats or tweaking baseball caps from startled heads. He paused on a large, pock-marked stone and listened to his colleague below enlightening a cluster of attentive faces.

  ‘You understand now about the Vikings. A violent lot they were – a bit like English football fans abroad you see on the telly – and everywhere they went there was blood and thunder and splitting of heads. And everything that wasn’t screwed down they lifted and took back home.’

  He didn’t stay for the rest of the exposition but walked on again, following the curved line of the stone wall, occasionally touching stones with his hand, wondering what other hands might have touched the same place. Sometimes a group of children would run up to him, seeking help with some of their questions, and he gave the answers in the form of easy clues. The wind played with someone’s dropped work-sheet and a child raced after it, stamping only grass with his foot as the wind maliciously swirled it further after a second’s pause.

  At the outer wall closest to the shoreline, he gathered a couple of groups round him. Jacqueline was there, her cropped blonde hair blown into a tattered bird’s nest, her nose dripping, unnoticed, until it splashed on to her work-sheet and was then staunched with the sleeve of her nylon Peter Storm. He got them to look over the top of the wall and down across the lough where the wind ribbed the water and black-faced gulls flew parallel and close to its patterned surface. In the distance were the humped tree-lines of other islands, the bob of boats moored in Whiterock.

  ‘Why do you think they might have built the site here?’

  ‘Because you got good views of everywhere all about.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. And why do you think views were important?’

  They screwed up their faces in concentration as gulls cackled overhead.

  ‘Sir, because you could see anybody coming and they couldn’t sneak up on you.’

  ‘Good man, Robert. Now, I want all of you to do something for me. I want you to imagine that we’ve got in our time machine and travelled back all those years, right back to the tenth century and this is where we live and work. And maybe it was a day just like this with a strong wind blowing and the same gulls flying about and you’re standing just right here, maybe taking a rest from your work and then you look up.’ He pointed far into the lough. ‘And you see something, something small at first, but it’s coming closer and it’s got a white sail and you know from its carved prow and rows of oars that it’s a longship. Look hard, can you see it coming smoothly, steadily, through the white-tipped waves? Can you see it?’ He had lowered his voice to a whisper as they peered into the distance, searching their imaginations for it.

  ‘And as you stand right here watching it come closer all the time, the wind pushes out the sail towards you and you see what’s on it. And what you see makes your heart jump and then beat faster and faster because on the sail is a black hawk. And a black hawk means . . . ’ He trailed off as if he had forgotten the meaning and as he did so a chorus of steaming voices shouted, ‘The Vikings! The Vikings!’

  ‘You’re right, it’s the Vikings!’ he shouted back, simulating panic. ‘And in not very long they’ll be ashore, what’ll we do? What’ll we do?’

  ‘Run!’ shouted Lisa.

  ‘Wet yourself,’ offered an anonymous voice from the huddle.

  ‘And after you’ve wet yourself, what’ll you do? Hurry, hurry, every second’s precious!’ He bounced back and forwards from the wall, counterfeiting a rising and infectious panic.

  ‘Sir, run away and hide.’

  ‘But what about everyone else, what about all your friends?’

  ‘Warn them by shouting.’

  ‘But maybe they’re working away over there and your voice can’t carry in the wind.’

  ‘Ring the bell!’

  ‘Good, Tony, ring the bell. Take Gerard and go quickly to the tower and ring it. Loudly, now, so everyone can hear.’

  The two boys looked at each other then sprinted off to the tower and set up a boisterous ding-dong.

  ‘And the rest of you, are you just going to run away and let the Vikings take all the most valuable possessions of the monastery?’

  A few thought yes, but more shouted no.

  ‘Well, then, quickly, we’ve only a few minutes left – what’ll we take? Think hard, think hard. Remember what we did in class.’

  ‘The books and Bibles with the drawings!’

  ‘Good, quickly, take someone to the church and get them.’

  ‘The golden chalice!’

  ‘Right, quickly, go and get it, Lucy. There’s not much time.’

  ‘The animals!’

  ‘Yes, we can’t leave them behind. You both go and round them up. Think hard about where they’ll be.’

  The group had almost dissolved. The two remaining boys had drawn twig swords, held a practice duel and were now preparing to repel the invaders. Only Jacqueline stood unoccupied. His mind had run out of tasks and as he struggled to create one for her he saw that her eyes were watering in the wind and then he realised she was crying. He led her aside, angling her into the privacy of the stone wall and crouched down on his haunches.

  ‘What’s the matter, Jacqueline?’

  She shook her head slowly from side to side, the tears welling up in her eyes, and with her finger touched a whorl of moss on the face of one of the stones.

  ‘Did your group go off and leave you?’

  She shook her head again and he knew it was not the reason. Soon, the other children would be returning with their gathered treasure trove.

  ‘Tell me what’s the matter. Please, Jacqueline.’

  She stared at the ground and her whispered answer was almost lost in the rising wind. ‘The Vikings are coming.’

  He fumbled in his pocket for a handkerchief and, putting his arm around her, dried her face. ‘It was only a game, it wasn’t real, Jacqueline. It was only a pretend game. The Vikings aren’t really coming.’

  Part of him wanted to laugh, part of him was ashamed at having scared her. It was starting to rain and he directed all the returning children back to the bus. They charged down the slope, shrieking and screeching like the circling gulls. He could see Hennessy hunched in the ruin of the church, trying to re-light his pipe. Taking her hand – it felt cold and very small – he led her back the long way, walking slightly in front to shelter her from the wind.

  *

  Listening to her describe it, it sounded like an SAS operation, complete with smoke flares, tape measurements, stopwatch timings. But at the end of the day Mr Beattie from the Water and Sewage Department had failed to come up with any real answers to the smell. The smoke bombs released in the outside manholes had fizzled out without permeating the house and for all his sniffing and pacin
g around, he had been unable to locate the origin of the problem. It was predictable too, of course, that the day he chose to arrive there was no trace of the smell, almost as if it was hiding from detection. He had checked the septic tank and studied the time it took for flushed paper to reach it, but the best he could do was to arrange for the tank to be emptied and promise that he would return with a colleague if the smell should appear in the next few weeks.

  Emma was increasingly exasperated by the problem and increasingly irrational in her demands that it should be fixed, almost as if she felt he should be able to conjure up some magic spell to make it disappear. Neither of them could think of anything more that could be done but it did not stop her pushing the burden of finding a solution on to him. Once he found himself about to remind her that she had been the one determined to buy an older property, oblivious to the potential problems such a purchase could bring. While the new carpets had gone some way to taking the coldness out of the house, it was obvious, although not expressed, that the place was too big for them. There were too many rooms, too many spaces which remained unfilled and each one reminded of the absence of family. Her parents had given them several older pieces of furniture which fitted the style of the house but did little to lessen the gap between reality and the pictures in magazines.

  Early morning incursions by rabbits had already consumed some of the shrubs she had planted in the garden and the exorbitant quotes they had received from landscapers had postponed any plans she had harboured. The one positive thing was, she had started painting again, often working from photographs she had taken. Sometimes she left him off at school then drove into the Mournes and spent the day sketching and photographing. Mostly, she painted water-colours, occasionally selling one in a gallery or to one of her parents’ circle. They were generally local landscapes and if he was really honest he did not much care for them. They were delicate and pretty, but somehow vague and undefined – pale washes of gentle colour which filtered all the grit and rawness out of the landscape. It was easy to see them as a reflection of her personality and he was increasingly aware, more than ever before, of those aspects of her which left him with a feeling of disappointment.

  He was old enough to understand that in a relationship there was always shift and resettlement, that weaknesses and irritations were invariably counterbalanced by other virtues, but in the last year he was conscious that his thinking about her had started to change. He felt more and more that he was caring for her and loving her in a way that was not dissimilar to the way he cared for the children in his trust. And if anything, he felt he was getting less back from her than them, but he knew, too, it was a difficult time for her, and he consoled himself with the belief that soon things might fall back into place, revert to what they had been before.

  The painting was a good sign. She had got her studio looking well and if she could sell a painting or two it would lift her spirits. Maybe if he had a quiet word with her father he might pull a string or two. And although on occasions his own mood could swing dramatically, he tried to tell himself that school was going quite well. No one could expect sweeping changes in a couple of months but in his own mind he was able to catalogue his successes. He had got a Parent-Teacher Association off the ground, set up working parties to facilitate the development of the new curriculum, had an EMU scheme up and running. Eric had even put up the new noticeboards in the foyer. On the negative side, he had to admit that the spirit of Reynolds still lingered like a thin layer of dust over the school and, despite his own ideals and approaches, it was certain that staff like Vance and Haslett continued to teach in the way they always had. That would prove a long-term struggle and one about which he had no great expectation of success.

  There was, too, an exceptional closure day approaching for schools to work on their new curriculum and plan approaches to assessment, but despite his best efforts he had been unable to find anyone in the Area Board prepared to put their head on the line and lead the session. He would have to do it himself and he knew it was a potential minefield through which he would be lucky to find a safe path. And Mrs Craig still had a leaking roof.

  As he sat in his study thinking of the best strategy he could hear Emma pottering about in the kitchen. He glanced at the two unpacked tea-chests which sat in the corner of the room.

  They were filled with books and records for which he had not yet organised shelving. He started to browse through them, lifting and examining mementoes of the past – the books and ideas a young man thought were important, the values on which you thought you could build a world. On the Road, his copy of Blonde on Blonde, Astral Weeks. Hendrix and Leonard Cohen LPs, more books and records a street map of Amsterdam. They all seemed embarrassingly dated, curios from another age, objects of potential derision. With a smile he thought that if the eight good men who had appointed him had been able to view the subversive contents of these chests he would never have got his job. But it all seemed so distant and harmless, even naïve – one more generation’s striking of a pose. His eye caught the grey cover of The Catcher in the Rye. He had not read it in ten years. He was flicking the pages when Emma came in. Phoebe – he had really liked that name, had even suggested they use it if it was a girl, but Emma had laughed at him and dismissed it from her list of possibilities.

  ‘A stroll down memory lane?’

  ‘Yeh, I’ll have to get shelves organised.’

  She lifted a Hendrix LP and stared at the cover. ‘You must have been a bit of a hippy.’

  ‘Long hair, flares, paisley shirts – the lot. But everyone had long hair in those days and don’t pretend you don’t remember.’

  ‘You’re forgetting, Mr Cameron, I was a child of the Seventies, not the Sixties. Abba, The Bay City Rollers, platform shoes. You made me read that book though, made me feel I wasn’t a complete human being because I’d missed out on it. Always the teacher, always trying to complete my education.’

  ‘Well, here’s a question for you, Miss Cameron. Why is it called The Catcher in the Rye?

  While she screwed up her face in pretend thought and made her eyes cross, he flicked through more pages.

  ‘It was something about Holden Caulfield and wanting to catch all the children before they fell over some cliff. I can’t remember exactly and anyway, I only pretended to like the book, like I pretended to like all those other books you made me read and the records you made me listen to. After you’d gone home I’d put on my Abba records, “Dancing Queen” and Elton John and skim a few pages so I could pretend I’d read them.’

  They both laughed and she sang a few bars of ‘Dancing Queen’, moving round herself in a little parody of a dance.

  ‘It was Holden’s dream where all these thousands of kids are playing in a big field at the edge of some huge cliff and if any of them were running or not looking where they were going, close to the edge, he’d catch them. He’d be the catcher in the rye – that’s all he wanted to be.’

  She stopped dancing and draped her arm across his shoulders. ‘And that’s how John Cameron sees himself – as the catcher in the rye?’

  He felt himself blushing, laughing off her suggestion. ‘Don’t be stupid, you’ve been listening to too much junk music. You’re brain damaged. And there aren’t any cliffs around here for anyone to fall over.’

  She ruffled his hair and smiled at his embarrassment then went back into the kitchen to make his packed lunch for the morning. He could still hear her humming and he resisted the temptation to play some of his records on the stereo, knowing that no other music could sound so welcome. He threw the book back into the tea-chest. Perhaps he kept too many things from the past, too many objects which should have been jettisoned. But he found it hard to discard the pieces which fitted together to form the pattern of his memory.

  She was getting ready for bed as he locked up the house. Each night she simply announced her departure and left him to turn off lights and television and lock doors and windows. He should have spent some more time planning the
in-service training day, but he could not face it and joined her in the bedroom.

  She was reading a magazine and he could see sweeping herbaceous borders, harmonious chromatic progressions. Although he read for a short while his mind was not really on it and when she set her magazine aside he followed suit. As the light went out he snuggled up behind her, his arm protectively round her waist. She was singing gently to herself, like a child lulling herself to sleep, and then she stopped and moved his hand from her waist and placed it on her breast. He cupped it lightly in his hand and kissed the swathe of freckles which ran across her shoulder blades and as he did so he felt her nipple harden. Turning round, she kissed him and held him tightly, then slipped her body under his. He hesitated, and though everything in her body told him it was all right, he was suddenly frightened of hurting her and his fear made him clumsy and she had to help him. Slowly, gently, like it was the first time, and then instinct took over and he was talking to her and kissing her and calling her stupid names like his dancing queen and everything was just like it had been before. But as he gave himself up to the rhythm of his desire, tried to fill the emptiness of his need, it was another voice he heard – the pleading, whimpering voice of his dreams. And across his mind like some frightened bird flapped a jagged series of images which he could not control or stop – Jacqueline’s face dropping like a stone on to her book, the gulls falling like snow into the open field, their circling cries above Nendrum. Tumbling after one another in a welter of tangled confusion which swept through him and which he could not control. And through them all the distant, plaintive cry of a child and then, in a crystallisation of fear, he knew that what he heard in his dreams was their own child, lost and drifting in some veiled and shuttered world from which he could never escape. Calling to him as he faded back into the gathering shadows.

  She had stopped moving and was looking up at him in confusion. He gave himself back to the rhythm but despite his frantic efforts to focus his mind, re-find his passion, he knew that it was gone. He faked a sheepish smile and apologised, then rolled on to his back.