by David Park
Taking the torch from his pocket he made his way towards the metal shed, walking slowly and trying not to trip over the littered parts of machinery. The sliding door of the shed was half open and when he was inside he switched on the torch, letting the beam play over the stacked polythene bales of silage. They shone in the light like black glass, the stretched surfaces taut like the skin of plums. From behind a row of metal milk churns slinked a cat, its eyes spots of amber. He directed the torch upwards into the metal beams of the roof where bits of machinery dangled from hooks. Something moved in the back of the shed. He spun the torch round on it and sparked a pair of eyes, the white of teeth, heard the deep growl rolling in the dog’s throat. The torch lit up the stiffened back and the growl rattled like some engine as it edged towards him, low to the ground, its legs ready to thrust it forward in a charge. He took slow steps backwards staring the beam into its eyes, glancing around him for some weapon, but in the darkness there was nothing to be seen, and he didn’t dare take his eyes from the animal for more than a second. He forced himself to keep his steps slow, his movements controlled, as he held his arm out stiffly like a stick, but as the dog hunched its back and tensed itself he half turned and in his panic stumbled over something. Falling backwards he heard the dog charging, the growl in its throat breaking into a barking that ripped the silence of the night, and he closed his eyes and swung the torch wildly, sending shadows skittering across the darkness. It was almost on him, so close he could smell its damp heat, its barking breaking close to his face, and then the swinging beam of light caught the rope which tethered it to some place back in the darkness.
As he stumbled to his feet the dog pulled against the rope and raised itself up on its back legs. Its unbroken barking seemed to crack the night open and, rushing to the shed entrance, he switched off the torch and ran across the arcs of light to slither into the shadows beyond. His breathing roared in his ears and there was a tightness in his chest. The bruise on the side of his face seemed suddenly alive, smarting with a new surge of pain that stung in the coldness of the night air. McQuarrie was in the porch – over his shoulder his wife’s face and that of their son. He was bending over, putting on boots, his blond hair almost invisible in the yellow square of light. Taking a gulp of air he started to move away across the fields as quickly as he could, stooping and crouching as he went. As he ran he could hear McQuarrie’s voice calling her name, over and over, and then two higher voices like echoes joined in the slowly fading wail.
He sat in the car, hunched over the wheel and tried to force his breathing into a calmer rhythm. In his head he could still hear the angry barking of the dog, McQuarrie’s voice calling out, the two other echoing voices rising like a descant in the background. Over and over until they fused in a pulse of pain. He put his hands to his ears and tried to still his being. And as a calm slowly spread through him he began to think of secret places, of the secret places of childhood, his mind alert and listening, like the willow rod in the hands of the diviner passing over the hidden parts of his memory. He jerked upright. Maguire’s place. He would find her in Maguire’s place. He should have seen it. The pattern had its own power, its own inevitability, and he felt it now flooding over the years, carrying him towards what he should have always known.
He started the car and drove down the narrow lanes that carried him to that place. They seemed to funnel him towards it as if he had yielded control over his own volition. He drove slowly, trying to prepare himself, but in a matter of minutes had arrived at the laneway. It was too quick – he wasn’t ready – and he drove by, went to the end of the road and then returned. He felt safe in the car, outside was the thick tide of night: cold, fathomless. He saw her holding the reading book, her pale face mouthing the words, heard himself telling her everything would be all right, and he parked the car and started up the laneway.
The leafless line of hedge jutted out at him, stark in the moonlight like coral, the slimy squelch of mud under his feet increasing his feeling of uncertainty. He shone the torch ahead, lighting up the greasy slope of the lane, and told himself that the slowness of his steps was caused by the uneven and sodden surface. He knew he would find her here, here in this place which stored its secrets like grass yellowing and rotting under a giant stone. As a boy he had watched it from the hidden folds of the tree, seen it always at a distance until that final day. He felt its hatred now, its implacable hatred for this person who had approached it like a thief and stolen what it had chosen to hide. He knew it would do him harm if it could.
He wondered what had brought her here and searched for a reason but knew it didn’t matter. She had come, oblivious to the danger, and been trapped in some webbed world which held her fast and smothered all her cries for help. It was its way of hurting him after all these years, holding her now in some shuttered place where she curled, small and tight, and waited for him to come. He had told her everything would be all right, stretched out his hand towards her and she had believed him.
He was at the top of the lane now and in view of the house, the barn beyond. He had never approached it from this direction before, always having come across the fields. He went to the house first, the light of the torch making no reflection in the glassless windows, and shone it on the door that slouched in on itself like a drunken man. He called her name, heard it swallowed almost immediately by the silence and vanish echoless into some void. He called again and again but his words plummeted like stones into the well of night. He kicked at the door with the sole of his foot until it flopped free from its rusted hinge, then stepped into the tiny space that served as a hallway. Patterned shards of paper peeled from the wall. There was a cold dampness and the smell of piss.
He followed his light through the tiny rooms, his feet shuffling through the tinkling brightness of broken glass. On one wall was sprayed a scribbled babble of names and there was a blackened blotch in a corner where a fire had been lit. Into the front room, his splintered, shadowy reflection moving across the mirror. He called her name again, his voice ricochetting round the walls, growing louder and louder, until he spun away and hurried to the openness of the night. Outside he gulped the air greedily and flashed the torch across the yard. The sudden thwack of a sheet snapped by the wind. The axe buried in the yellow, rotten trunk of the tree. Almost tripping as he ran with it, his knee banging against the head. The shoes. The shoes bought in Dawson’s with their clean white soles.
He turned towards the barn and with each step the whimpering grew louder. Louder and louder as he got closer to the darkness of the open doorway. But it wasn’t like her voice, it wasn’t like any human voice as it collapsed into a strangled, choking breathing. He hesitated at the entrance and called her name, called it again and again, urging her to come to him, to step out of the darkness, but at the sound of his voice the whimpering faded, replaced only by the wind rattling under the slate roof. He wanted the beam of the torch to be broader, its light brighter, as he played it into the shadows. She wasn’t there – he tried to tell himself there was no need to go any further, but the need to be certain was greater than his fear and, dipping his head, he edged inside. He stayed close to the doorway and shone the light into the corners, and in his memory saw again the white frosted face, the tangle of smirched hair, the scab-covered spindle legs, and as he did so he felt the taste of his own sickness. He was conscious of something scurrying along the wall beyond his light but he pulled the beam away, not wanting to see it. He held the torch tightly, suddenly frightened that he might drop it and plunge himself into darkness. His hand was shaking and he supported it with his other one as he started to take careful steps backwards to the entrance.
He sat in the car, comforted by its familiar confines. Outside the night seemed to stretch edgeless and infinite. He felt some of his new-found conviction beginning to weaken. She hadn’t been there when he had been so sure that was where he would find her, and once again he felt the fear of being part of something that was outside his control, of being carried a
long on something which he couldn’t steer or stop. It left him feeling rootless, weightless, swept on by an uncharted current. He tried to reassert his will, to anchor himself again to the self-conviction which had seemed so strong a short time before. The full beam of the headlamps cut a swathe through the darkness of the high-hedged roads as he drove slowly, unsure of where he was going, the mechanical control of the car soothing and lulling him into a calmer train of thought.
He couldn’t go home – he knew that – but there was nowhere left to look, nowhere he could even begin to imagine she might be. A car came round a corner and he fumbled clumsily to dip the headlights. He tried to think of his own childhood, of the options which he might have considered, but he couldn’t pretend to himself that he had any understanding of how she felt or thought. And as he admitted that, his efforts to help her, to know her, seemed suddenly paltry, half-hearted. He had seen her as a symptom of what was wrong in Reynolds’ school, and if he was truly honest, as a cause he could champion, a wrong he could publicly right. With a shiver he remembered what Emma had said about using children and he wondered again why he had said nothing about the wreath of bruising. Because he wasn’t sure? Because he was frightened of being wrong and in the end more frightened of the consequences for himself than for the child? Each thought was sharpened by a sudden sense of shame. But it was still not too late. The credit he had accrued from that moment in the past, the years of caring for children – these, too, had to count for something.
On impulse he drove towards the town. He could see the link of orange lights somewhere in the distance. She was a child who lived in a world which was separate and unshared with anyone. Perhaps inside that world there was a place she felt safe, somewhere she would go to hide, to be invisible to the things that hurt her. He thought of the day he had discovered the copse overlooking Maguire’s place, had climbed into the swaying canopy of flickering light and shade. To be invisible and safe – that was something she would clutch close like a secret. Small and safe, watching the world at a distance, breathing the stillness. Perhaps she had such a place and perhaps she was safe in her sanctuary, waiting for him to come.
He stopped the car some way from the school and walked to it in the shadows of the hedge. Across the road the windows of his caretaker’s house were curtained and dead, but he hurried across the playground and unlocked the front door as quickly and quietly as he could using the torch. He couldn’t risk switching on the lights. From outside the sodium lights lining the road speared orange shafts through windows. There was the familiar smell of school but heavily laced with disinfectant and polish. Only the absence of human noise made the moment strange, but the building seemed to creak and rustle with sounds that had no explanation. He could hear, too, the tick of the clock in the secretary’s office, the stretch of distant pipes. It suddenly seemed foreign to him, the corridors ahead lifeless and flat like some field of stubble.
His shoes squeaked on the tiled floor as he crossed the foyer and then he stepped on some dried-up leaves which had fallen from the display boards. He shone the torch up at them, saw the frame of brittle leaves and shrivelled berries. Some of the backing paper had loosened and sagged forward. Part of a firework had flapped free, revealing the cereal packet which formed its insides. It would soon be time to take it all down. He remembered the way the bare boards had looked and knew he would be faced with a constant battle to keep them covered with new work. Everything that represented a change from what the school had grown accustomed to would require the expenditure of time and energy. Everything would have to be pushed, nothing would roll forward of its own momentum. He had lost Laura Fulton and Fiona Craig and that had weakened his position, left him without a solid base on which to build. Some of his ideas would have to be put on hold, a few even abandoned. He fingered the bruise on his cheek and suddenly felt tired in the face of the struggle ahead of him.
His office brought no sense of comfort, the decoration provided by his personal memorabilia a spurious attempt to generate a sense of ownership. He shone the torch across the desk, lighting up the sliding pile of unopened mail. Some day soon he would cart it all out to the incinerator. He sat at his desk and listened to the strange pulse of sounds that came from far-off corners of the school. They made him shiver. He remembered the first morning he had sat there and listened to the noises outside as hundreds of children had scampered to their first class, and the feeling of loneliness that had brought. Trying to focus his mind again on the child he went to the filing cabinet and pulled out the manilla folder that bore her name, but the meagre lines of information created no image of her in his head nor produced any new ideas. He found it hard to visualise her face, to form any precise image, and he wished the folder contained a photograph. There was always something unformed about her, some pale absence of feature which made her blend with the background, bleached her indistinguishable from her surroundings. Only her eyes, only the blue of her eyes. He clutched at that memory, pulling it close to his consciousness, staring into it like the children had stared into the rock pool. It gave him a new sense of urgency, scattered the welling self-pity.
His steps in the corridor sounded loud and intrusive. He ran his hand lightly along the wall as he walked, his fingers feeling the pitted surface of the plaster. Past the closed doors of classrooms, past a frieze of the sea which Mrs Douglas’s class had completed some weeks earlier. Blue paper waves, a yellow crust of sand, white chalk squiggles of birds, cardboard fish – all enclosed by a frame of real shells. He fanned the light across it and as he did so his hand caressed the contours of the shell he carried in his pocket. He remembered the sky and sea merging in the gloom, the silhouettes of the children perched on the rocks, the only light where the waves broke in jagged tatters of white.
He opened Vance’s classroom with the master key. The room seemed smaller now, the geometric patterns on the back wall so close he felt he could reach out and touch them. The poster of Mozart, the neat piles of books. Vance’s room. The children in silent rows listening to the music which cut them off from each other and from themselves. He could hear the music in his head as he stood in front of the empty desks. It flowed coldly into the corners and crevices and then contracted into the single solitary beat of the metronome which sat on Vance’s desk. He wanted to shout, to smash it into silence. And then he swore – a disconnected, meaningless orison of words, linked only by his need to stifle all other sounds.
He walked down the narrow row where her desk sat at the back of the room, her tongue peeping out of her mouth as she tried to keep inside the lines, the crayon clumsy and awkward in her hand. He stopped where he had stood that first history lesson and felt the stiffness of her body to his touch. He knelt down in the darkness at the edge of the desk and tried to look into her eyes, to look through them and catch some glimpse of what world lay beyond. He held on to the stanchions, the metal cold against his skin. The smell of urine, a blue biro streak like a vein on her cheek. But still she had no face, no precise expression or feature, like a map without contours or scale. Only her eyes were clear to him. He remembered her mother’s face pressed against the glass of the porch, his own splintered reflection moving like a ghost across the mirror in Maguire’s place. Tracing templates on to paper. Colouring them yellow for gold, printing her initials on the blankness of the page. The marks of her mother’s hands hanging frozen in the glass like prints in the snow.
He sat on the wooden chair, his coat trailing the ground, and pointed the torch at the board. A frieze of perfectly formed lettering scripted across its top. Friday’s date in the top corner. He moved the beam to the wooden units of shelving at the side of the board where text and exercise books were stacked. A neat pile of manilla folders. He moved the torch on then moved it back. A set of class folders. His knee clipped the top of the desk as he stood up and made his way towards them. Their names were printed in the top right corner and each one was devoid of decoration or graffiti. Only the occasional bruised grubbiness indicated that th
ese were used by children. He flicked through them, spilling some on to the floor, until he found hers near the bottom of the pile. He carried it to Vance’s desk and sat down, holding it carefully as if it was his first link with the child.
Inside was a jumble of pages, some folded in on themselves, others creased and crumpled. He lifted each one out, smoothing the folds flat and set them in rows across the desk. Pages of large, loosely formed writing which slipped off the narrow blue lines and sloped away towards the edges of the page. Pages pulled from a colouring book and crudely shaded in. Drawings in thick waxy crayons. He tried to sort them into some chronological order but there seemed no connection between any of them. And nowhere could he see any sign of Vance ever having looked at anything or written any kind of response. He cursed him aloud, bursting the words through the tight clench of his teeth. He read the written pages carefully but mostly they consisted of paragraphs copied from some reading book, interspersed with exercises where she had to form the plural of words or change the tense of a verb. There was nothing personal, no expression of feelings or write-ups of events which had taken place. There was nothing which revealed anything about her life, no clues to what existed in her head. He started to replace them in the folder, shuffling them neatly like a pack of cards, then gathered up the pages of drawings. He was about to close the flap of the folder when he paused and held the torch close to the waxed crayon marks, then pulled it back to encompass all the pages. There was a similar pattern to them, similar colours. He propped them up against the book rack at the front of the desk and tried to make sense of them. Trees – they were drawings of trees, leaning in from the edges of the page towards each other. Trees forming an archway, the tops of their branches meeting. He could see it now – brown-barked trees shooting out meshed branches like a spider’s web. What was it they overhung – a road, a river? He looked from one to the other. In one the colour was green, in another black. It wasn’t a river. And then he knew that what he was looking at were drawings of the old railway line.