by George

by Wesley Stace

  “If you like,” said Queenie, but hurriedly thinking better of it: “Let’s just finish our drinks.”

  After a moment of decision, Queenie took Joe’s hand in hers.

  “Queenie,” said Joe in polite resistance.

  “Shh!” she said. They sat without moving. She put her hand on his leg.

  “Queenie!” I said, without moving my lips. It went unheeded, unlaughed at. I had meant to defuse the situation, put the brakes on before it was too late. As it was, I watched the crash from a horrifying vantage point. She leaned over, took his right hand, and moved it to her bosom, placing his fingertips just inside the neck of her dress.

  “Go on, then . . . ,” she said. His progress was not quite as she had planned, so she leaned over, moving her hand across his lap until it settled, and put her lips to his. They kissed without seeming to move. She moaned rather self-consciously, took his other hand, and placed it on her leg. If he moved his hand three inches farther up beneath her skirt, he would reach the top of her stockings, feel the clasps of her suspender belt, the handful of flesh above, which spilled over like a bag half full of water.

  “Queenie,” said Joe, his resistance less persuasive.

  “I know,” she said. “I know.” She stroked his hair and pulled his head to her bosom, where he rested happily, looking straight at me. They made a bizarre tableau in front of my very eyes, a surrealist Madonna and Child. “Oh, hold on!” she said merrily. She quickly got up and turned off the light, plunging the room into darkness. “Come here.”

  The sofa shifted as he got up, led by her hand, and the bed creaked as one of them, both of them, landed upon it. She murmured his name. It was then that the noise began, slowly at first: grunts, creaks, and sighs. I thought of stockings, flesh, tan underwear, ballooning cami-knickers, and a brassiere the strap alone of which was two inches wide.

  The only light, the glow from the bars of the heater, bathed me in a hellish glow.

  “Those eyes,” she said, suddenly looking over at me with a laugh. “I’m not having those eyes on me!” She got up and turned me round so my head was facing the cushion.

  I remember nothing more.

  Next thing I knew, it was daylight and my box was open beside me.

  “All night?” asked Diane.

  “No, of course not. He had to go to the Beauchamp.” Queenie brushed out the bottom of the box with her hand and smoothed the lining.

  “And?”

  “Nosy!” But Queenie’s tone answered the question perfectly well enough. And where were we going? Not out of the frying pan into the fire? After all I’d gone through last night, it surely couldn’t be that I was being taken to a children’s party today.

  “My very own cousin Queenie!” Diane feigned surprise.

  “Well, I just did what Echo told me,” said Queenie, picking me up by the hole in my back.

  “I wasn’t privy to those pearls of wisdom,” said Diane, thinking it less than she deserved.

  “Oh, you know . . .” The sentence and I dangled in midair while Queenie decided how specific to be. “She told me to, to, to take him in hand.” She gave the last few words a confidential emphasis as she hoisted my feet over my head.

  “And did you?”

  “Yes, I did.” She put me into my box, bottom first.

  “And more than that?”

  “And more.” She patted me on the head.

  Was it really, on top of everything, to be a children’s party?

  “Queenie!” said Diane. It was the last thing I heard as the lid slammed and the key turned in the lock.

  I was trapped.

  Three Parts for Fisher: Androcles

  At Charing Cross Station, nothing had changed. Potter was propping up the same bar, drinking the same beer with the same purpose, while the same boys waited to get the same train to the same school. George’s escort, however, was different. Reg, too proud to ask for a porter, scraped the edge of the trunk along the platform, while George carried his tuck box.

  “We’ll come and visit Sunday after next,” said Reg. “And I want to see some of your tricks then. Oh, and here’s a little going-away present from Henridge’s. They’re a bit special: stripper deck. Have a shufti.” George was unbearably moved, so much so that his thanks seemed rather nonchalant. Neither knew whether to shake hands or embrace, an indecision further muddled by the self-consciousness they felt in front of the watching schoolboys. It was up to George to set the tone, so he wrapped both arms around Reg’s midriff and clung on as long as possible. He’d never had a grandfather.

  Potter herded the boys towards the train, and George lost Reg, who was under strict instructions not to stand and wave, in a forest of bodies.

  “Hello, Fish,” said Campbell, without enthusiasm. “What’s that about tricks?”

  “Nothing,” said George.

  Secrets were of paramount importance at Upside.

  Chapel was more sombre than usual, prayers a little more earnest. Inevitably, many found themselves regretting opportunities wasted at home, moments in which they had allowed themselves to take freedom for granted. George had a deck of cards in his pocket, and as they sang and prayed, he fingered its edge.

  He was never without cards now, and whenever he had a spare hand, he practised the various sleights. His hand was barely large enough to palm a card, but, according to the book, the principle was the same: learn it now, and you’d be a master when you grew into it. His arm dangled, as if idly, between two chairs. When he fumbled the card, he waited until the next prayer to pick it up. He had made no progress by the blessing, but that was the proof: all he needed was one card and the Lent term would fly by.

  Commander Poole made his usual tour of duty during prep. George flipped over his cover: “Library book, sir,” but he was concentrating on the ace of spades in his right hand. At one point, it fell to the floor. George gasped and Poole noticed.

  “Bookmark, sir,” said George, and picked it up.

  After lunch the next day, he happily changed into his games clothes in the dressing room without checking the board, barely registering the chatter around him, about how the first eleven would shape up, how the goals didn’t have nets yet.

  Steering the farthest course from the football pitches, George watched his cold breath in the air and turned the corner towards the pavilion. He had barely thought of Don over the holidays and now found himself wondering whether Don had spent Christmas with his parents or alone in his cottage at the end of the driveway. He looked forward to exchanging a few of his tricks for some newly discovered distant-voice lore.

  The glass on the door rattled as George pushed it open. Don wasn’t there, nor his coat, nor any evidence of him. The kettle didn’t look as if it had been used in weeks, and there were a couple of mugs ringed at the bottom with the brown tar of instant coffee. No sign of life at all. Even the tiny fan heater hadn’t been used, its flex wrapped around itself as though it had left and returned. George poked around but found only Don’s portable ashtray sitting on one of the chairs. He opened the lid. There were three stale butts. Where was he tapping his ashes?

  George took the deck from his pocket to entertain himself, but after a while it seemed selfish sitting in the pavilion when Don might be hard at work somewhere, so he went to look for him, pocketing the ashtray in case Don had forgotten it. It was hard to avoid the games fields, since this was exactly where he thought Don might be, either on the lawn mower or raking leaves by the all-weather pitch, and George’s search took him by a blue versus green football game, where Mr. Wilding was repeatedly blowing an abrasive whistle.

  Poor sods, thought George, thanking God that he’d had the wherewithal to avoid this fiasco. The word in the dressing room had been right: there were no nets on the goals, no corner flags, and, in fact, no lines. There were just white wooden goals, nothing else. Where was Don? And why weren’t the pitches ready?

  He had just turned back to school when Wilding shouted, “Fisher! Why aren’t you on this p
itch?” George wondered what he was talking about. He wasn’t there because he didn’t play games, because he worked with Don. He didn’t answer. “Fisher, get over here.” Wilding was sufficiently riled by the indignity of playing on an unmarked field, so George scratched his head, trying to look unconcerned, and approached. “Run!” shouted Wilding, and George broke into a saunter. Twenty-one players stared at him.

  “Why are you late?”

  “I didn’t know I was meant to be here.”

  “Didn’t you even bother to look at the games board? Where are your boots?” George shrugged. “Well, then you’ll have to go in goal. Get in there.” Goalkeeper was the most dreadful position of all, where any attempt to avoid the ball resulted in disaster. His team sneered as he mooched towards the goalposts.

  “You’d better not let any in,” said Fisher Major at left back. Punishment, however, came from Wilding, detention the consequence of his abject display.

  Despite the humiliation, George felt a sense of achievement as he walked back into school, shunned by every other games participant, his hands frozen purple. Surely that would never happen again: Don would return and he would once more be spared. George checked whether his name was indeed dangling on the games board. Bizarrely, it was. While he was pondering this anomaly, Hartley bellowed his name down the corridor. George remembered the trepidation he had once felt on being summoned to the headmaster’s study, feeling no such thing now. He left it a polite minute and then knocked.

  “Come!” mumbled through clenched teeth and pipe. George reeled on entry, nauseated by the overstewed tobacco. Hartley considered him and clicked his pipe against his stained lower teeth. “Once upon a time there was a schoolboy called George Fisher. Did you have an enjoyable Christmas?”

  “Yes, thank you, sir. You?”

  “Yes, I did, thankyousoverymuchforasking. Now . . .” The “now” took George by surprise, as did the subsequent pause. “Sad news, I’m afraid. Donald has left us here at Upside, gone elsewhere . . . rather unexpectedly, in fact . . . and his place will be taken by Mr. Blackstock. Mr. Blackstock is not sympathetic to your assistance, so I’m afraid it’s . . .” He looked up. “. . . back to games for you.” He gave the last word particular force, and suddenly it was all about you and I, as he prodded in George’s direction with the stubby end of his meerschaum. “You don’t like it. I know it. But I say it’s up to you to make the best of it.”

  “Where did he go?” George had barely begun to consider the implications of compulsory daily games.

  “Where did he go?”

  “Yes, I was wondering where he went, if he was all right.”

  “Well, I . . .” George had never before seen Hartley lost for words. This grizzly bear of a man looked out of the window not knowing how to evade the question. Schoolmasters had a tendency of reverting to type at such moments — punishing someone, telling him off — but Hartley wasn’t like that, and Don wasn’t just the groundsman. “Your solicitude does you credit.” He drummed both hands on his desk and delivered an official diagnosis, rather as a doctor than a concerned father. “Donald is of an unpredictable disposition, and I’m afraid that he was unable to continue his work for us. I can say no more.” He smiled, though it wasn’t a real smile: he stretched his mouth as wide open as possible in contemplation and combed his beard with his fingers.

  “Can I see him? Is he here?”

  “Is he here? Why would he be here?” George didn’t say anything. He didn’t want to annoy Hartley, but he couldn’t unknow what he had discovered. “I know you don’t want to play games. You know you don’t want to. But you can’t sit in the library all afternoon. I’m afraid that is the way it’s going to be.”

  George bit the side of his lip. This wasn’t about games! Where was Donald? He left the study as though he had just been caned, but it was his soul that was beaten. One thing had made all the rest worth it; that was gone.

  He couldn’t rid himself of his last image of Donald, weeping in the gloom of the pavilion. He had no reason to doubt that Hartley was telling him the truth, but had Donald recovered? Was he well? Was he alive? Was it because George had forgotten him over Christmas?

  The boys and teachers ignored George as though he were invisible. He felt like the tramp who lived at the back of the tube station by their house or the mad old trout who talked to herself as she pushed a doll in a pram down the High Street. George had interrupted her monologue once to say hello, and she had bared her fangs like a wild dog.

  There were two lessons left before dinner, a double English class for which he was meant to have written an essay on what he did in his holidays. He hadn’t done it and he couldn’t have cared less — he’d say he forgot. That could work once a term. He went to the tuck box room and opened his box. He pulled down the secret compartment, in which he had hidden the first two of the notebooks, his project for the Lent term, and got out the first volume.

  In his right hand, he took a pack of playing cards.

  Word of the library’s new status as a functioning literary concern had spread among the board of governors, causing an influx of books over Christmas. Rather than donations, these were grandly called bequests, which was, as a cursory glance revealed, a euphemism for books that would have been left unsold at a jumble sale. As he flipped through them under the supervision of Mr. Burgh, the English teacher, George sighed. Everything he had weeded out was being thrown back over the fence — this time with a pompous bookplate: Donated to the Upside Library by Brigadier Sir James Holyoke, KG (1932–1936). The book in this instance: The Boy’s Own Book of Knots (with a large piece of masking tape where the spine had once been).

  “We’re going to have to throw a lot of these out,” said George.

  “Nonsense,” said Mr. Burgh, who saw the library as his own private source of free secondhand books. “They’ll all have to be catalogued,” he said, sniffing through for attractive titles, presumably referring to any of the books that didn’t leave with him.

  I did my best, thought George. That’s my work with the library done.

  “And look,” said Burgh, “here’s something handy. Androcles and the Lion. We’ll need all the copies we can get.” Burgh had one of those faces that would never look old. A dense growth of sideburn did nothing to make him look more mature, since the rest of his chin and cheek was incapable of facial growth. To nickname him Babyface would have been too easy: this recent arrival, in reference to the way he twittered, was called, simply, Bird. The similarity to his name afforded the extra frisson of calling him Bird to his face and him not noticing. “Auditions draw nigh, Fisher. You’ll be auditioning, of course.”

  The school play: Androcles and the Lion. Only last term, George’s reaction would have been: Maybe it won’t be so bad, but now it was: How much worse is this going to be than I can even imagine? “Well, I say audition, but of course you’re a shoo-in.” Rehearsals, time, work, human interaction. Bird saw George’s reluctance. “As well as acting, I thought you might like to be my assistant director. Perhaps we could even get your esteemed mother down here to show us yokels how it’s done.” He drummed his fingers. “And, frankly, I don’t know how someone could put their all into being an assistant director and so on, with the scenery, the costumes to pick up, and the lines to learn, while being out on a games field every afternoon.” It was a bribe. “And how you’ve managed to get detention this early in term, I have no idea,” said Mr. Burgh. “Quite a feat.”

  “Yes, I’m . . . rather proud of it,” said George, in the manner of James Mason.

  “It’s nothing to be proud of. And no one likes a smart aleck.” There was a moment’s silence. “The offer stands.”

  Due to the library’s recent accessions, detention had been moved to an undecorated room that had not yet been allotted to a form.

  “What are you here for?” Poole asked irritably.

  “I was late for football practice. I didn’t have any boots.” Why? What are you here for? he wanted to ask.


  “Ah, yes. Your alibi has gone walkabout, and now there’s nothing left for you but to play games with the hoi polloi. Terrible for you. Copy out of this.”

  George sat down behind a stack of foolscap at the middle desk and prepared himself for fifty minutes of tedium, copying out a physics book called How Sound Works. Zigzags emanated from a white radio antenna on the bright purple cover, and below the title there was a drawing of a human ear about to be speared by a quiver of arrows. He opened the thumbed textbook just where the laminate was peeling. It had reached the point, only two days into the new term, when he didn’t care anymore. He was beginning to sympathize with Bunter.

  “Diagrams as well,” said Poole, who was marking books without interest, his technique to scan each page, pick a random mistake, and obliterate it with a long red line that was understood to apply to all possible surrounding errors.

  Copying had become such a habit for George that when he started his transcription of “The Behaviour of Sound Waves,” he was able to put the work over to one side of his brain, so he could think with the other. After a few minutes, he read back what he had written. In his handwriting, it became slightly interesting.

  Sound waves, which he had never considered in specific terms, travelled in three distinct, easily explained ways: reflection, refraction, and diffraction. And that apparently was it, as dictated by Science — they didn’t hop round a corner inaudibly and manifest themselves in a cupboard.

  Poole was standing over George’s shoulder. “And the equations?” he asked, and sat down again.

  It was just as Donald had said, and George had known, though he had been so seduced by the possibility that he had deferred believing the obvious truth: no one under any circumstances could make his voice come from anywhere other than his mouth. That was how sound worked — here it was in black and white.

  George started to reproduce a list of equations: Speed, Frequency, and Wavelength. Speed equals distance (meters travelled) divided by time. Frequency equals cycles divided by time. Wavelength equals velocity divided by frequency.