The Rye Man

by David Park

  He had an informal interview with a Mrs Conway who had been suggested by Houston, but he wasn’t impressed. She hadn’t taught for several years, knew little about the new curriculum and talked more of her friendship with Haslett and Vance. As a short-term replacement she might have been reasonable but it worried him that if she got her foot in the door, and Miss Fulton decided she’d had enough, he could well find himself stuck with her. When she’d gone he spent some time phoning round other heads, asking if they could suggest someone, but he drew a blank. When he’d given up he phoned Laura Fulton to see how she was and when she’d be likely to return. It was her mother who answered and she proceeded to tell him how exhausted her daughter was, the number of hours she had put in every night on school work, about the collapse of her social life and how worried she and her husband were about her health. It sounded as if she blamed him for the situation. Their doctor had told her that she must take a complete break and wouldn’t let her return until he gave his approval. She would be off at least the rest of the week and there was a vagueness about her answers in relation to a return which worried him, but he said little, apart from conveying his sympathy and his hopes for a full recovery. After completing the call he phoned Mrs Conway and asked her if she would start work right away and felt equal amounts of relief and regret when she agreed.

  As he sat at his desk looking at Laura Fulton’s timetable he saw that it was the period when she took Jacqueline for extra help in reading. He went down to Vance’s room to collect her. The class were listening to some classical piece of music played on Vance’s own CD-player which he sometimes brought to school. They sat up straight in their rows, arms folded, each face staring blankly into space, as if listening to some foreign language whose meaning eluded them. He nodded apologetically to Vance and signalled to Jacqueline to come with him. As she stood up she tripped over the strap of a schoolbag and knocked her books to the floor. A snigger ran round the room but Vance silenced it with a look. She gathered up the books and replaced them on her desk, then, bringing her reader, passed up the aisle without raising her head.

  He didn’t want to intimidate her by using his office so he looked around for somewhere else. As they walked down the corridor he glanced out of a side window. It was starting to rain again. He saw Eric heading across the playground towards his house, a copy of the Sun held on his head like a flat cap. The wind billowed out his coat revealing a large pack of pink coloured toilet rolls. He took her into one of the cloakroom areas and found them two chairs but before he started to read he tried to get her to chat, asking if she liked Mr Vance’s music. When she shook her head in reply he made her speak by asking who her favourite pop groups were. He’d never heard of them but pretended he had. They sounded like rap bands but he got no response when he asked about them further. He asked about her mother, said they’d enjoyed her jam and asked what her father and brother were doing on the farm, persisting until she made some kind of response. At first she spoke in single words or short phrases but he kept asking simple questions until gradually, as she relaxed, her replies became less closed and staccato. She spoke of helping her father on the farm, herding cattle along the road when they were moving fields, and he nodded his head with interest, watching her intently as she talked about her father.

  She was wearing a grey sweat-shirt with a faded print of a Florida surf club and a grey pleated skirt with white ankle socks and cheap-looking trainers, the rim of their soles grimed with grass stains. On one of her knees was a crusted scab where she had fallen or banged her knee. He could see little pin-heads of grit in the penumbral skin around it but it was the type of mark that every other knee in the school wore – a kind of badge of growing up, of running too fast, of too reckless a jump. It almost reassured him, binding her to the other children. When she spoke her strangely pellucid eyes seemed to widen and dart about like small fish in a pool, as if enjoying the freedom but always wary of the watching world like some timid creature who comes to drink at a water-hole. Her skin was pale and unmarked, blending with the blondness of her hair which was cut in a shapeless style and suggested her mother had done the job. But despite the alert movement of her eyes there was something incomplete, almost unfinished about her features, like an image which hadn’t fully focused. It made her seem younger than she was, vulnerable and unformed.

  He thought, too, of the bruising on her arm, remembered her head falling like a stone on to her book, the stiffness of her arm the first time he touched her. Tried to weigh it against the other images – her mother touching her hair, pulling up her socks, the way she spoke about helping her father on the farm, McQuarrie’s fist dropping on to the table. He had to be sure, even if it was only in his head. As she opened and turned the pages of her book, trying to find where she had left off, he stared at her and tried desperately to read what her face told him, but as he looked at her eyes there was only a limpid transparency which reflected nothing other than his desire to know.

  She started to read, finger-pointing the words. ‘Tom and Alison went on their bikes to Cherry Tree Farm.’

  There was the now familiar faint scent of urine from her.

  ‘It was a very sunny day and there were no clouds in the sky.’ She stuttered through the words, a pause between each one, her voice an unbroken monotone. ‘When they arrived at the farmhouse their aunt Dorothy gave them a glass of lemonade and two of the buns she had just baked.’

  She was identifying the words quite well, stumbling only a little over the unfamiliar syllables of the aunt’s name, her mouth rehearsing the attempt. Occasionally he helped her but only when she had ground to a halt. He wondered how much she was assimilating but for the moment she moved on at the snail-pace which represented a struggle of concentration and determination. Like climbing a mountain, one tiny foothold at a time, resting on a safe little ledge where she recognised some familiar grouping of words, then staggering onwards, her finger probing like a blind man’s stick. He wondered what would happen to her in life, wondered too what the world looked like through those translucent eyes (the blue the colour of some insect’s delicate wing). Did she know her world was different from the children’s she sat beside each day or was she happy within the parameters of her own world because she knew no different world existed? Tom and Alison on Cherry Tree Farm, helping their uncle set up stooks of hay, making a little wigwam where they had a picnic and fed crumbs to the birds. Cherry Tree Farm with white palisade fencing and yellow fields where there was no muck or shit or bits of tractors with their insides spilling out.

  His eyes ran round the cloakroom – it had been one of the original classrooms. Mrs Preston had once given him a sixpence for his skill in reading, bringing him to the front of the class to show off. She had always picked him to read in carol services. One year he forgot to wait for the congregation to find the passage and he had finished the prophecy of Isaiah before anyone had time to find it.

  It had grown dark outside. In the distance he could hear music from Vance’s room. He remembered the bored faces. He wondered if Jacqueline had made one of the fireworks in the foyer and as his thoughts turned to her, he was suddenly aware that she had stopped reading, the music from down the corridor had stopped. The only sound was the rain hitting the window. He looked up to see a pale face mouthing silent words, the lips forming wavering, voiceless vocables and he shivered as another memory washed over him. From somewhere far off he heard his own child crying out to him, calling his name, and he stretched out his shaking hand and gently took the book from her and lightly stroked her cheek with the back of his fingers.

  ‘It’s all right, everything’s going to be all right.’

  She looked up at him with confusion but for the first time he was sure of what he had to do. He gave her back the book with its story of Cherry Tree Farm and watched as she walked back down the corridor to her class, her shoulder lightly brushing the wall.

  In his office he rummaged in the filing cabinet, pulling out folders and forms until he found t
he one he was looking for. A pink double-sided page entitled, ‘Request for Psychological Assessment’. He started to fill it in, her name, address, date of birth, parents’ names. Nature of the problem, when he had discussed it with her parents, what steps the school had taken to try and help the situation. He signed his name and then looked at the only question which remained unanswered – the date when the parents had given him approval for assessment. He hesitated a second then filled in the date he had been to see the McQuarries, folded the form neatly and sealed it in an envelope.

  *

  On the way back from their visit to the Norman Castle at Greencastle he stopped the mini-bus at Annalong and the children tumbled out towards the shore. The tide was still out and beyond the wreath of grainy sand and the matted wrack of leathery seaweed, rocky peninsulas stretched like black fingers into the sea. They scampered about the beach, poking the seaweed gingerly with toes or bits of driftwood, nervous about what might suddenly emerge. Thomas Graham grabbed a wet-skinned branch and flailed it above his head like a charioteer, while others examined spent orange cartridge cases which had washed ashore, handling them delicately as if they might suddenly explode. The wind streamed everyone’s hair and a couple of girls stood head to toe with it, their arms stretched out like scarecrows, their clothes rippling and flapping.

  He watched them all from the blunted top of a wooden breakwater, fighting to hold his balance in the wind, as Norman Crosby discreetly pocketed shells he had picked up like a shop-lifter; Claire and Lisa swopped tiny bits of coloured glass, holding them in their cupped hands as if they were precious stones. The class was beginning to spread out too much and he tried to attract their attention and draw them closer by calling to them and waving his arms like a windmill. Putting two fingers in his mouth, he whistled shrilly, and as heads lifted along the beach he beckoned them. When they were gathered round in a ring of bleached faces, he made them all stand on the wooden breakwater and got them to copy him as he lifted one leg and stretched it into space. Spreading his arms out like wings, he told them to hold their balance like statues, then he jumped down and eliminated anyone who was moving.

  After he had found a winner he raced them down to the water’s edge and lined them up facing the sea. He showed them how to skim stones, how to pick smooth, flat ones, and when each of them took it in turn everyone shouted the skims in unison like a boxing referee counting out a fighter. They stood facing the swelling sea and skimmed their stones, cheering each skip and laughing when they sank without trace. Finding a washed-up plastic oil container he flung it in a whirling arc as far out to sea as he could and then everyone threw at it, only a rare hit making it buck. Above the wind he shouted all his oldest, most used sea jokes about seeing the sea plain, nervous wrecks which trembled on the sea bed, crabs arrested for pinching things.

  They thought he was still joking when he suddenly pointed out the bobbing black head of a seal, but gradually they believed him and jumped up and down to try to see it in the trough between the waves. Someone else saw another head and then another, but they turned out to be a line of marker buoys and everyone laughed at the mistake. Then they clambered on to the rocks, peering into pools with an intensity of concentration that made him smile. Someone saw a crab and a group ringed the latticed and podded pool, squatting on their haunches, arms across shoulders to hold a linked balance. It had scurried under a stone and Martin Davison was rolling up his sleeve to dislodge it. He tried to scare him by warning about the size of the crab’s lethal claws, and telling him about a film he had once seen about killer crabs which stripped the skin off their human victims, inch by inch, leaving the eyes to last. The boy hesitated and then in the face of his jeering, laughing classmates, plunged his arm into the water. A girl squealed and a couple of boys held on to his legs in case he would slide head first into the water. With a splash the rock turned over and under the covering cloud of sand and disturbed water the crab scuttled off to some safer refuge.

  Gary Williams chased a squealing Dawn Clarke with a crab’s claw he had found and he had to persuade a couple of girls that it wouldn’t be a good idea to go for a paddle. Soon it would be time to go. He watched them free-wheel about the shoreline, tattered and driven by the wind, oblivious to the time slipping by. Then, without being aware of her approach, Jacqueline was standing in front of him, her face pinched and blanched by the cold, her eyes pale flecks of blue. She held out her hand. He didn’t understand. But then he saw the shell which she was giving to him. A white scallop shell ridged and perfect in itself. He took it carefully and thanked her. It seemed an important moment but as he searched for the right words she turned away, and before he could call her back two other girls came and sat beside him. He made them tell him a joke and then thought up impossible jobs for them to do – counting the waves, popping all the black pods of seaweed, sifting all the sand into a thimble. They thought up some for him – dive to the bottom of the sea and find a pearl, ride the waves, make a hundred skims.

  A couple more joined the group and he told them about smugglers and the ghostly bell which could sometimes be heard ringing in the church graveyard. When he had finished they fired out questions, wanting all the unanswerable questions answered, but he promised to tell them more when they were back in school and then gave them the real task of gathering up everybody and heading back to the bus. He set them off but made them walk sideways like crabs holding their hands like nippers.

  The sky was darkening now, the children standing on the rocks, silhouettes against the closing sky. Something in him wanted to stay, not to have to go back. The happiness of the moment began to fade as the thought of the imminent return spurred its own misery. He felt the salted sting of disappointment beat against his face. Nothing seemed to have worked out the way he had expected. He didn’t know why. Emma, the new house, the school, all of them somehow tinged with a taint of failure. It was a feeling that was new to him but one which increasingly clung to him, no matter how he tried to shake it off. He summoned his talismans, gently turning the images over in his mind like the pages of a book – the sunshine through the slatted bars hitting the upturned faces, the lilting skipping song of the girls, even his moment of elevation to small town hero – but they seemed worn and frayed and couldn’t drive away the mood fastening to him like lichen clinging to the surface of the rocks.

  Since her outburst Emma had been quiet, moving about the house like some ghost and no words or actions on his part seemed strong enough to draw her back into her former self. She was polite, even conciliatory at times, but although neither of them spoke about the things that had been said, there was a consciousness that something had changed, perhaps for ever. Maybe she was right and he had been selfish with her, and if he had been able to love her more, would have known instinctively what to do to help her. Now he moved about her at a safe distance, handling her gently as if always driven by a consciousness of her fragility. She rarely painted, and before he stopped asking, she seemed unsure of how she spent each day, giving vague answers to all his questions. He wanted her to see her family doctor but even when she agreed, she put off making an appointment, finding one excuse after another. As he thought of himself more as a kind of nurse it absolved him of some of the responsibility of loving her in the way he had once done. There was a kind of relief in that, a feeling of respite from having to pretend to himself while outwardly there was no difference, nothing she would see or be hurt by. He never wanted to hurt her and so could never tell her about his dream, the dream that moved like a shadow through the night, seeking him out just at those very moments when he thought he had escaped it, had rooted out the spore.

  School was wrong too. He had silently laughed at her belief that she could translate some glossy magazine image into a living reality, and yet he had constructed an image for himself of the school that he would miraculously transform, and now found himself increasingly unable to make it real. It had all felt so right, returning to where he began. He had felt so confident about it, so
assured that he could achieve everything by just being himself, and now these few fleeting moments when he was able to be with the children were the only parts of his job which stirred any warmth or reward. He had given up the thing he loved and exchanged it for something which was inferior. It felt like he had betrayed all the children he had ever taught – the ones in the photographs in his office, the names in the roll books, the ones who were still to come. Betrayed the better parts of himself. He thought of Reynolds shuffling about his manicured lawn and brushing leaves into a polythene bag with liver-spotted hands. The right size for the job. He knew what it meant now as he felt his life encompassed by meanness, trapped in a small place in a small time, a future already marked out and harnessed.

  The last of the children were getting into the bus. He fingered the delicate ridges of the shell and stored it safely in his pocket. The sky and darkness of the sea blurred and merged in the distance, the swelling waves surging towards the empty shore, the only light where they splashed and broke, white against the rocks.

  *

  By the time he had left the last child home it was quite late. He hoped he hadn’t spoilt any plans Emma might have had for their evening meal, but when he parked the car he saw the house was in darkness. There was no light in her studio and the whole place was enveloped by a stillness. She hadn’t told him of any plans to go out and as he had the car he couldn’t think where she might have gone. There was no note to be found in any of the places they usually left them and the only sign of activity in the kitchen was a couple of unwashed coffee cups. He looked into rooms and switched on lights in an attempt to dispel the dankness which seemed to flow from the sullen corners and hallway.