The bus pulled up outside the school and the occupants spilled onto the pavement. There they created a cacophony of noise and a riot of colour; children of all shapes and sizes laughing, talking, shouting and, in one case, crying. (This was a year eight girl, Samantha Hopkins, who had been dumped by her boyfriend that morning on the bus because he had decided that he liked her best mate more. Her best mate liked him too so she couldn’t be Samantha’s best mate anymore and. well, you get the picture). Generally they carried on like they were all on their way to a glorious beach holiday in Spain. The huge group of children gradually settled into a multi-coloured column that snaked its way slowly up the school drive. Jerry and Emma were dawdling at the back, like a couple of malingering soldiers at the end of a marching column, and as they walked along the road they noticed that everyone was pointing to something on the ground as they passed. When they drew level with they saw that it was a puddle of vomit in the road.
“Uuugh! I hate the sight and smell of sick,” said Emma, turning her face away.
“Someone’s bacon and eggs didn’t agree with them,” replied Jerry, pretty pleased with what he assumed was a relatively humorous quip.
They reached the main courtyard of the school and both saw Charlie at the same time. He was sitting on one of the wooden benches that were dotted around the perimeter of the big tarmac recreation ground in front of the school. He was slumped over holding his stomach and looked ill, white and shocked. They were both immediately concerned for their friend and rushed over, taking up a place on either side of Charlie.
By the time Charlie had finished relating his account of the early morning ambush by Mick Clark, Steve Dibben and Mark Jennings, and giving full details of the assault he had suffered, Jerry was steaming with anger and Emma was at her most high-minded.
“Charlie, if you don’t go to Awkward, I bloody well will. This can’t go on. Clark is just a bullying thug and he doesn’t belong in same place as people who want to get on with their school life. He should be expelled.
If you say exactly what happened Awkward will deal with it, I just know he will.”
Emma stroked Charlie’s arm as she spoke; she was full of anger at Charlie’s situation as well as tenderness towards him for his experience.
“Emma’s right Charlie, I think the time has come to stand up to him,” said Jerry, “after all, if we can get enough people together, what is he going to do? He couldn’t fight off a whole group could he? We’ll show him that we have a united front. I know that Dave Short and Pete Johnson have issues with Clark and I bet they’d be up for it.. “
“No!” snapped Charlie, who, despite his pained stomach, sprang off the bench and turned to look back at his two friends. “No,” he repeated in a slightly softer tone. “I know that you guys really mean well and are only thinking of me but I don’t want to do anything.” He looked at Emma. “If you go to Mr. Auckland, an investigation will probably take place but ultimately nothing will come of it. The best we can expect is a temporary suspension. If you remember, Mick Clark was expelled last year but his mother went to the education board and kicked up a stink and two weeks later he was back.”
He then turned to Jerry, “I like the idea of a huge group giving him a bit of his own medicine but let’s be realistic here Jerry, he could take on any four lads in the school at the same time-with one hand tied behind his back. And that’s without mentioning his two goons that he has with him all the time. Given all that, who would really stand a chance? There would have to be ten of us. And anyway, this is my fight. He seems to have singled me out and no one else appears to be getting it in the neck at the moment. I am not sure what I will do, or what I can do, I just know that I can’t take much more of this. I’m brighter than him. There must be a way.”
Charlie smiled at his two friends and said, “I really appreciate your concern-you are my best friends but this is something I’ll end up handling myself, there’s no other way, and when I’ve handled it, it has to stay handled, once and for all.”
The bell rang for the start of the school day and they joined in with the rest of the pupils and shuffled silently and thoughtfully into the building.
THREE
Charlie skilfully managed to avoid Mick Clark all day and now it was time to leave school for home. He usually travelled by bus to the nearest stop and then walked the remaining half a mile. Jerry was coming back with him tonight so he could look forward to some company. Jerry would also be staying the night, which pleased Charlie because it meant that they could have their usual “putting the world to rights” discussion when the lights went off. Charlie and Jerry’s late night conversations covered a huge range of topics and would inevitably lead to them agreeing on a series of measures that they would take if they suddenly had the power.
Charlie’s usual top three decisions were, in no particular order, that schools would be free of people who were not interested in learning, that Sky television would be provided to single parents for free and that he was three inches taller.
Jerry, on the other hand, had decided he would immediately leave his dysfunctional family and live on his own in a nice apartment, that Satan would call Damien back to Hell immediately and that he owned a state of the art PC complete with all the latest equipment. He never revealed to Charlie that his truest wish was for Emma Bartholomew to be hopelessly in love with him. Charlie just wouldn’t understand that.
Tonight Charlie planned to ask Jerry if he would like to spend the summer break with him at his grandfather’s house. Charlie’s grandfather owned a huge old house in Putney, south London, and Charlie had spent the last few school holidays there. It helped his mother because she did not have to worry about him and Charlie was delighted to spend time with Gramps (his name for his grandfather) because Gramps so totally understood him. Gramps knew exactly what made Charlie tick, what he liked, who he admired, what his favourite food was, what music he
liked. Nothing, in fact, seemed to escape Gramps and he always gave the appearance of possessing the energy of someone thirty years younger. Charlie did not know exactly how old Gramps was but you could swear that no matter what age he turned out to be, he was actually a lot younger. There was something about Gramps that Charlie could not put his finger on, something that marked him out as being different, special if you like, but what exactly it was Charlie could not quite fathom. Gramps was just Gramps after all.
“Just remember what I said dickhead!”
It was the familiar voice.
“Yes, I will,” was Charlie’s resigned reply.
Mick Clark had appeared at the gates of the school but was clearly distracted by Jennifer McLeod, his girlfriend, and had only half-heartedly tossed out the comment to Charlie as he walked past. That was a relief to Charlie. At least he knew he would have a problem-free wait for his friends, who both appeared a few minutes later.
They travelled together until the bus approached Emma’s stop; she stood up just before the vehicle shuddered to a halt and said goodbye to the two boys not noticing the wounded look of unrequited love in Jerry’s eyes. Charlie and Jerry travelled another two miles on the bus and then they too got off and began the walk to Charlie’s home.
The cold start to the day had given way to a much warmer afternoon and the two friends walked along without much of a care; their coats and sweaters tied around their waists and their backpacks dragging along behind them. Every so often they would stop to inspect some interesting object by the side of the road or to peer into someone’s living room window so that they could criticise the bad taste in ornaments. They were totally at ease in each other’s company and even though they had only met when Charlie had first come to Cuttleworth, just over a year ago, they behaved like they had been friends for years. The warmth of the afternoon and the fact that the pain from Mick’s punch had long since subsided meant that Charlie was in a good frame of mind and things didn’t seem quite so
black now.
“I am sorry I was a bit abrupt this morning when you and Emma were only trying to help me,” he said.
“Oh don’t worry about it,” said Jerry, “I understand your point of view and I can see how useless it would be to go to Awkward. I expect
that you’re dead right and that nothing much would get done. He doesn’t believe that the school has a problem with bullies.”
“And if it wasn’t for Mick Clark, it wouldn’t have much of one,” mused Charlie.
“That’s true. Clark does seem to be the worst; except for those two snot stains he calls friends.”
“Actually,” said Charlie, “Dibben and Jennings are probably not that bad on their own, they just realise that they are better off being part of Mick’s reputation rather than trying to exist on their own. And Mick needs them as some sort of confirmation of his own position. They give him the feeling of power that he needs. It is a… um…” Charlie searched his mind for the appropriate word, “…a symbiosis,” he concluded.
“A what?” asked Jerry.
“A symbiosis,” repeated Charlie, “two organisms that need each other to survive or whose existence is mutually interdependent.”
“Oh okay,” said Jerry, “look there’s a dead bird.”
They examined the piece of road kill for a few seconds and then continued their walk to Charlie’s home.
“What do you think you will you do about him-Mick, that is?” asked Jerry after a few minutes of walking in silence.
“I don’t know. I keep thinking up ever more elaborate plans for getting him off my back and even delivering some payback, but everything I think of seems to fall to pieces as I apply some logic to it. I have been hoping that he will just get bored and find someone else to have a go at.”
“Why do you think he singles you out?”
“Because he knows he can. And he definitely has some kind of inferiority complex. But mostly I think that it’s the old story-power and domination. I think that what really bugs him is that although he can physically dominate me he can’t make me one of his cronies and that I’m not afraid of him. He knows that I think he is a useless moron and that really hurts him, almost as much as he hurts me with the beatings he hands out.”
“Still, it can’t go on Charlie. He could have done some serious damage to you this morning. He could have ruptured something and given you… I don’t know. internal bleeding or something like that. The fact that you were sick shows how hard he whacked you.”
“I know. I am going to try and stay out of his way until the end of term which is only a couple of weeks away. Then I won’t have to see him for six weeks. Maybe things will be different when we go back next year. Who knows?”
“I suppose,” said Jerry.
“Actually,” said Charlie, “I’m going to spend the holiday over at my grandfather’s house in Putney during the break. I meant to ask you, do you want to come as well?”
“Has the Pope got a balcony?” replied Jerry, which was his standard sarcastic reply when the answer to a question was blindingly obvious. “That will be brilliant Charlie! I’ll have to ask my mum but it’s a foregone conclusion, the answer will be yes. She’ll be made up not to have to think about me for a few weeks.”
“Great. That’s the plan then.” Charlie smiled, “I’ll give Gramps a call and let him know that you’ll be there too.”
Jerry smiled.
FOUR
Jerry couldn’t, as it turned out, spend the summer with Charlie at his grandfather’s house. Charlie was so disappointed that he sulked for the entire day when Jerry had phoned him to let him know. This was unlike Charlie who was not normally prone to sulking. Everything had been going according to plan; Jerry had asked his mother who, as Jerry had previously predicted, had agreed immediately. But then, completely out of the blue, Jerry’s dad, who was a milkman, had decided that Jerry would have to help him on his milk round for the summer to earn some money and contribute to his keep! It was the most ridiculous thing that Charlie had ever heard and at first he thought that Jerry might have been making it up but he quickly shook that thought from his mind. He was well aware that Jerry wouldn’t have lied to him and that he had desperately wanted to come.
It was the Monday of the second week of the summer holiday when Charlie’s mother delivered Charlie to his Gramps’ house in Putney without his best friend, Jerry Squires. She swung her slightly battered old orange Volvo into the driveway, making the gravel that covered the drive crunch satisfyingly under the tyres of the car. She parked up in front of a pair of old wooden garage doors that had been painted dark green by Charlie’s grandfather in 1976 and, as far as Gramps was concerned, that would see them through for the next forty years. Hence the paint had more or less peeled completely away revealing a white skeleton of weathered wood underneath. Inside the garage was Gramps’ 1964 Ford Prefect that he would often point out still ran perfectly well; he could see no reason to think about upgrading it to a newer model, although, if you caught Gramps in an unguarded moment he would express a fondness for black Jaguar S-Types.
Charlie and his mother got out of the Volvo and followed a narrow pine walled path to the front of the house. Charlie loved this house more than any other place he had ever been in. It was huge. The house, as he understood it from Gramps, had been constructed in 1798, which made it over two hundred years old. It had been in Gramps’ family for nearly one hundred and fifty years when Charlie’s great, great, great, great grandfather had won it from an army general in a game of cards. Apparently, the general was so upset at losing the house that he resigned from the army, travelled to India, and was never heard of again. Gramps said that he had been angry at his stupidity in betting the house in the first place and that he eventually lost his mind and “went native”. Other reports had suggested that the distraught General had visited with some old comrades and then taken his own life but the truth was that no one really knew. Charlie had once decided that he would like to follow the General’s trail one day and try to find out exactly what had happened to the old man.
Since then the house had been passed down through the successive generations of Charlie’s family, on his mother’s side, and would one-day pass to his mum and, Charlie assumed, eventually to him. Gramps had often said to Charlie, “One day lad, this house will belong to you and you must never sell it but pass it on to your children and them to theirs. That is the way in this family.”
The house had sixteen rooms and Charlie knew each of them intimately. He could tell you what size the room was, what furniture and ornaments it contained, how it was decorated and what the view from the window was. There was nothing Charlie could not tell you about the rooms of his grandfather’s house. Or so he thought. Today would be an extraordinary day for Charlie. Quite simply his life was never going to be the same again.
Ever.
Gramps was pottering. He liked nothing more than to potter. It is what gentlemen of a certain age do when there is really nothing else for them to do. Pottering is an art form and requires a high degree of skill and understanding. The ultimate trick of pottering is to be seen to be really
busy doing nothing that needs to be done and everything that doesn’t need to be done. Gramps had been up, showered and breakfasted by o-seven-hundred hours precisely and then commenced his potter. He started in the kitchen rearranging two cupboards-moving mugs and cups from the right cupboard to the left one and then moving dinner plates and side plates from the left one to the right. He moved into the study and looked along his rows of books and decided that they really needed to be in alphabetical order, by author-last name first or, perhaps, first name first; maybe they should be ranked according to title, or, perhaps, according to subject matter. He settled on categorising them based on the colour of their binder and spent an hour doing just that, pausing only for a fifteen minute break to decide whether the books should be shel
ved randomly, regardless of height, or should be in order of descending height. Or ascending. He settled on ascending. Then changed his mind.
After the job was done he checked his watch and saw that it was o-nine-thirty hours and therefore time for his second cup of tea of the day. Gramps went back into the kitchen and filled the kettle with water, replaced it on its stand, and switched it on. Gramps drank Earl Grey tea, no milk, but a slice of lemon and a spoonful of honey. He made the beverage and sat down at the long oak table in his kitchen, stretching long and hard-a good start to a day of pottering in earnest. He took a sip of tea and wished that he had a cigar to smoke. Oh how Gramps loved a good Havana cigar but he had given them up on the advice of his good friend, Doctor Cirencester, and though he hated to admit it, he did feel a bit better. But he still missed them terribly.
He took another sip of tea and let his gaze rove over the kitchen, occasionally draping itself over a particular knick-knack. Gramps loved knick-knacks. He was the opposite of a minimalist-he was a maximalist. Gramps had collections from every corner of the world: wooden war masks from Africa decorated the stair well; Inuit spears from northern Canada were lined along a rack in the study; chunks of amber from the Dominican Republic filled a seventeenth century mahogany display cabinet; aboriginal artefacts from Australia were placed against the living room wall; ancient and delicate papyruses from Egypt were sandwiched in glass and hung in a spare bedroom and small marble sculptures from Greece sat on shelves in the library. There were collections of just about everything and anything from everywhere. They were probably worth a
fortune, especially as one or two of the ancient items were actually… the doorbell chimed. Charlie!
Gramps swung open the front door and bellowed, “Hello to one and all. Hail and well met!”
Gramps had a curious way of talking as though he were taking part in an old historical movie all the time but you soon got used to it. Anyone who met him would not think Gramps was that old because he seemed so strong and full of life. You know how some people seem to grow smaller and weaker as they grow old? Well, with Gramps it was exactly the opposite; he had seemed to grow larger and stronger as the years passed. His voice was strong and firm and when he spoke, everyone took notice. When he shook your hand his grip was like the Hulk’s and his mind was sharper than the Subtle Knife.
Charlie Watts and the Rip in Time Page 3