by George

by Wesley Stace

  Clearly Vox and Bunter were fictions, fantasies. Their authors (grown men and, presumably, not idiots) had no special insight into, or belief in, voice throwing; they just thought it a good literary device to cause the required mayhem. Radio waves travel at 300,000 kms. Yet George thought it likely that the effect of their tricks, if it were possible they be performed, was accurately described. In their fictional worlds, Vox and Bunter could throw their voices and were brilliant mimics. 300,000 kms equals the speed of light. In the real world, the grim Don-less world of Upside, George couldn’t, and certainly wasn’t.

  He had been reproducing his text on autopilot when he looked down at his work, suddenly conscious: radio! What if Bunter or Valentine had had use of the radio? Weren’t voices thrown every day at 300,000 kms? George couldn’t mimic (or even throw his voice), but he had one thing in his favour: radio waves travel at the speed of light. Vox and Bunter hadn’t needed it, but think what they could have achieved if they’d . . . He would find a way to harness that power.

  “Fisher,” said Poole. “You can stop now. Thank you. Bring your pages here.” George did as he was told, but, to Poole’s annoyance, loitered. “Well? Off with you.”

  “Can I hang on to the book, sir?”

  “Why?”

  “I was . . .” He didn’t want to say he was enjoying it, in case it appeared confrontational, but couldn’t think of what else to say. He took one lingering look at the purple cover. Perhaps How Sound Works had done its job: it had taught him that throwing your voice wasn’t out of the question at all — it just required new technology.

  “Nothing,” he said, and left.

  Term continued as miserably as it had started. He cheated as often as possible and practised his sleight of hand with the bought time. Androcles at least spared him daily hell on the football field.

  He’d read the play and hadn’t enjoyed it. There was some fairly funny business at the beginning, when Androcles and his nagging wife were confronted with the stricken lion, but after this promising prologue, things took a sharp nosedive as the Romans herded the captive Christians to the gates of Rome (act 1) and escorted them to meet their fate at the Colosseum (act 2). The introduction of the characters was painfully schematic: the proud beauty (ready to die for her principles), the belligerent strongman (unable to turn the other cheek), and the useless coward (only thinking about himself). Everything worked out nicely in the end, with the buffoonish emperor’s ludicrous reversal on Christianity, and no one (except the coward, offstage) dying; Androcles and his old friend the lion waltzed around the Colosseum to the applause of all, and curtain.

  In the middle of the play, the writer, despite his best attempts with the animal-loving Androcles, whom he had provided with a modicum of funny lines, committed the greatest sin of all: he resorted to speechifying, as Frankie called it scornfully, to make his point. When speechifying started, drama and comedy went out of the window. Between the prologue and the final reappearance of the lion — now called Tommy, like the cat in Dick Whittington: it was just another skin part — the play sagged like a giant blancmange. Judicious cuts were required.

  To Bird, however, the play was a masterpiece, the perfect marriage of form and content.

  “When we put it on at school,” he said, confirming everyone’s suspicion that Bird was reliving his youth, would rather be in the play than directing it, and, QED, was going to be a terrible director, “we had a marvellous lead. Of course, I was only one of the slaves, but I’ll be looking to inspire you with a little of the spirit of that production.”

  George had inferred that the title role was his for the taking. Seeing the audition call on the notice board, he realized to his momentary horror that there were two title roles, but Bird had only one in mind: George would be Androcles without audition. The line of hopefuls outside the gymnasium stretched almost to the dining room.

  “You going in, Minor? Gonna be one of the girls?” sniggered Fisher Major. If only Bird would cast him as one of the girls, but that great brute could never pull it off. Besides, the female parts would be given to the nine-year-olds, who would be less self-conscious in a dress.

  “Who’s for the skin part?” George asked Bird on an inspiration. He had finally located the director nesting in the masters’ common room, a grey hiding hole where the armchairs smelled of linseed oil and liniment.

  “The what?”

  “The lion.”

  “The skin part? You’re going to have to talk English; we don’t understand your backstage slang here in the real world. Anyway, for the lion, let’s see, we have Jonty Smith, Patrick Morris, Campbell, and . . .”

  “Fisher Major. He auditioned. He’d be good.”

  “I thought Ferrovius the strongman for him.”

  “Shouldn’t Ferrovius be someone bigger?” suggested George. “Someone from the first fifteen. They don’t have to be awfully good. That makes it funny.”

  “He’s right, he’s right,” Burgh said to himself. “Who do you think?”

  The play was cast in half an hour and a list displayed on the school notice board, around which a scrum quickly formed. Those who had already read their fates passed George on their way back. “Fisher, you’re the main part,” one of them said.

  The read-through was deadly boring, a boredom exacerbated (and protracted) by Bird’s repetitions of many lines in an improved form and his enthusiastic laughter at jokes no one else was enjoying. Rehearsals were no better. The cast quickly divided into two groups — those who liked the idea of acting (slightly over 50 percent) and those who were there for the fringe benefits, cared little for the play’s success, and, ring-led by Fisher Major, preferred to rile the director.

  As assistant director, George attended all rehearsals, but his title meant little. According to Bird, an actor should deliver his lines while standing completely still with one arm raised; everybody listening should stand with his arms at his sides. This was Bird’s one directorial note. Apparently, he thought the play a series of tableaux vivants. Cuts had been made, but these had not solved the obvious problems.

  First night was only six weeks away. George liked to sit on top of the wall bars in the gymnasium, turning a card round in his hands. From this vantage point, he was afforded a bird’s-eye view of the director’s bald patch and Fisher Major crawling around in his shorts. He felt safe up here — if someone came for him, he could easily repel him with his feet. He looked out across the fields.

  One day he saw Donald’s old van disappearing around a corner. To Bird’s annoyance, George excused himself and rushed out, only to see Blackstock, Don’s surly replacement, emerge from the van, picking his nose unselfconsciously. From the Pope window, George had spied smoke rising from the chimney of the house at the end of the driveway: someone was living there. He imagined this was Blackstock, assuming Don’s possessions one by one.

  On an afternoon in early February, a parcel arrived for George. He didn’t recognize the red felt-tip pen or the style of packaging (slack kitchen string tied in knots). Perhaps something from Sylvia, he hoped — she had been on his mind since Christmas, and he kept turning over the phrasing of a postcard he wanted to send her — but the very placement of the stamps, an array of seemingly random amounts, didn’t seem right.

  Normally there was quite a procedure involved in getting a package, so it was odd too that this one was lying idly outside the headmaster’s study. Perhaps the post had just arrived. He took it to the tuck box room and opened it to find a box, on which there was a note: “The closest we’re going to get! Happy Late Christmas, Don.”

  Inside, wrapped in inappropriate pink tissue paper, were two black walkie-talkies, secondhand. They were too heavy to be toys; rather, they were intriguingly official, military transistor two-way radios, with sturdy leather straps on the backs of their leather cases, bought from one of those stores whose windows were dressed in camouflage, khaki combats, and netting. There was a thumb-operated Push to Talk button — its function self-evident — bu
t also something called a DX switch, a fine channel tuner, a phone plug-in, an AG/FG mode: and no accompanying manual. Their antennae extended nearly three feet and wobbled like the teeterboard at the circus. Any other young Upsider would have immediately found a friend to see if they worked, to test their range, but George stuffed them into his tuck box.

  “The closest we’re going to get!” Don had written, presumably referring to the fact that having one walkie-talkie in one room and one in another was the only way you could really throw your voice.

  Wherever Don was, he was able to read George’s mind. George had worked out the need for new technology, and Don had come to the same conclusion. George was still within Donald’s range.

  But when George read the note again, it made him sad: “The closest we’re going to get!” What if it referred not to distant voice but to George and Don, to the fact that sending a package to George at school was the closest they would get to each other? Or what if Don meant that the closest they would ever get to communication would be talking through walkie-talkies? In that case, was it at least an invitation to communicate?

  And where was Don, anyway? George didn’t know what to think, but like the great detective himself, he surveyed the package for clues. He had only ever seen Donald write little notes to himself with a stubby pencil he kept in his jacket, but this was definitely the same hand, disguised by the childishness of the red felt-tip. The school address was clear enough, and there was no return address — of course not; that would be too easy. Besides, Holmes’s analytical prowess didn’t require that kind of assistance. The postmark should be his first step, but it was too smudged to reveal anything.

  He turned the brown paper around, his mind unfurling narratives involving a local newspaper, used as extra padding that would give away the geographical origin of the package, perhaps even the date. Holmes always analyzed the watermark on a piece of paper, but there would be none on this coarse brown wrapping, and George decided to turn his attention back to the stamps.

  It was bad luck that he couldn’t make anything out of the postmark. Then he looked again. Suddenly, he was explaining himself to Watson in “The Case of the Unexpected Package.”

  “Eliminate the impossible, my dear fellow, and you must be left with the truth.

  “The package was not announced at lunch, neither vetted by the headmaster nor by the matron — an ugly-looking woman I should not want to meet in a dark alley — for the simple reason that the package did not arrive by the mail. The British postal system knew nothing of this delivery. Look at these stamps, their motley configuration. Observe how the ink of the postmark has not sullied the brown paper — these stamps have been steamed from another envelope and affixed to the parcel with some paper glue, used, to judge by the amount, by a man of a melancholic disposition in his mid-to-late thirties.

  “Oh, Holmes, how can you possibly . . .

  “The package, Watson, was delivered by hand. It was carried — like so — by this string so impulsively tied around the parcel. This I deduce from the slackness of the twine. Further, from this slackness I surmise that the parcel was not wrapped anywhere in the school, and, safely assuming it came from outside, that it was not transported in an automobile and brought the short distance from the automobile to the desk outside the headmaster’s office, but rather carried a fair way: say, the length of the school driveway.

  “The man who delivered this package by hand, Watson, must have been dropped off at the end of the driveway and walked the remaining distance, for I see no traces of mud, none of the scuffing one might normally associate with a walk through the woods, the only other mode of ingress. And the plot thickens: didn’t the erstwhile groundsman have a house at the end of the driveway? And would a total stranger have licence to walk the entire length of the driveway in broad daylight? My case is made!”

  “Fisher, what on earth . . . ?” It was, unfortunately, Mr. Morris, whose attitude had changed noticeably since George’s friendship with his son had fizzled. And what on earth? George was caught red-handed in dream world, walking up and down the tuck box room, gesticulating in grand Rathbonian manner.

  “School play, sir. Learning my lines.”

  “Well, tidy up that brown paper and get to class.”

  George had the solution. Despite Hartley’s implication, Don had never moved. George would have to see for himself.

  “The closest we’re going to get!” George wandered to his next class, for which he had already copied out the answers to a spelling test, and considered this sentence. If Don still lived at the end of the driveway, he couldn’t be much closer; legally, however, he couldn’t be farther away. Beyond the school boundary (the conker trees), an inch was as good as a mile. Attempting it by daylight would be a suicide mission. It would have to be done in the dark.

  That evening, he ambled nonchalantly out of prep, informing Mr. Wilding that he had to do some work on Androcles, implying as vaguely as possible that Mr. Burgh had ordained this absence. Plays gave a boy licence. Wilding, who had given George up as a sporting lost cause, didn’t care either way.

  George went down to the tuck boxes, got his walkie-talkies, put on his blazer in the changing room, and left by the gravel path behind the school, tiptoeing by the headmaster’s office. The side gate was locked, but he clambered over without too much difficulty. The air beyond felt crisp. He set off down the driveway, feeling liberated, as good as he had since he had arrived back at Upside.

  Although he’d never walked it in the dark, the drive, with its speed bumps and SLOW CHILDREN signs painted thick on the asphalt, was familiar from the daily morning constitutional. Beyond the conker trees, however, all was foreign. It was one thing to travel its length the other way in a car when driving back from a holiday; it was short enough when the grey hulk of the school was the last thing you wanted to see. But this way, and by foot, every slight bend revealed another unfamiliar piece of driveway, another snaking stretch of tarmac: it was farther, and colder, than he had imagined. Deeper into the woods he went, like one of the babes, until the trees arched over the driveway and obscured the stars. To his right, a rustling: a bird, perhaps, or a squirrel, but perhaps something larger, more dangerous. With everything so unfamiliar in the gloom, he began to wonder whether he had somehow taken a wrong turn, but there were only two ways — to the road and to the school, and the school was behind him. It would seem shorter on the way home, he told himself. Didn’t it always?

  If Don was still in the cottage, George knew that there would be no problem, but if it wasn’t Don, or if somebody else saw him, one thing was certain: George was doing the most illegal thing you could do at Upside. He was out of bounds. Not only that, but he was almost to the road. He had lied to get out of prep and jumped over a gate that was locked for a perfectly good reason: to keep him inside. Expulsion was the only punishment for such a crime. The enormity of this hit him in an instant, immediately followed by the defiant thought: Expel me.

  He heard the distant hum of a car engine, which he assumed to be coming from the road at the end of the driveway. At first it was just a yellow glow in the distance, but as the car approached, the headlights became more distinct, like searchlights, and George ran behind one of the larger oaks, holding his breath. The tree split the main beam and threw the lights onto the sludge and leaves around his feet. He saw a tiny pair of eyes reflect deeper in the wood as he waited until the car’s rear lights disappeared towards the school. What was he going to have to do next? Pull a thorn from a lion’s paw? He went back to the drive, looking up every now and then to check for any other car. None came.

  Nobody, to George’s knowledge, had ever been expelled from Upside. Bullying, violence, cheating: all merited the ultimate humiliation, yet these were common occurrences and went unnoticed. The Blackout Society discussed it in hushed tones after lights-out; they subconsciously feared that the punishment would unmask them in front of their parents, but George couldn’t sympathize, for Queenie and Frankie were on his sid
e. He’d tell them what was what. So Expel me, he thought. Where was the threat? He didn’t want to be at Upside. He knew he didn’t belong there. He couldn’t even quite put his finger on why he was there at all. He had so little to offer the school, except the possibility of some red ink for its scholarship board, and yet there he was, encouraged to do prep, be in the play, brush his teeth, and go to bed at the same time as everyone else. To deprive him of Upside, or vice versa, would make no difference at all.

  George had meant to hatch a plan as he walked. But the night had affected his mind — the sounds, the dark, the car, thoughts of expulsion — and he had nothing. What if Don wasn’t there? What if Don was there? What if?

  And if George was caught and got cold feet about expulsion, he could always say he was running away. Going out of bounds was very punishable, but going out of bounds to run away was a guarantee that all would be forgiven. This last resort spoke badly not of the troubled child himself, but of what he was running away from. In such a situation, there would be a discreet word with the parents, a week’s sabbatical for their son, perhaps, but no punishment as such. And wasn’t suspension or expulsion a kind of reward for a runaway? George felt like a man with nothing to lose.

  Finally — the walk must have only been about half a mile in all, but it couldn’t have ended soon enough — the trees parted, opening on a storybook view of the cottage. A plume of smoke curled from the chimney. There were lights on downstairs. The van wasn’t in the driveway, but this was to be expected: Mr. Blackstock had inherited that.

  A nondescript pair of Wellington boots sat outside the back door. George approached cautiously, aware of every crunch of gravel, past a washing carousel from which hung dungarees and a couple of tea towels. A shadow moved in the kitchen; George could hear voices, perhaps a radio. He walked around the back of the house. The curtains were drawn.

  He continued to the far side, which faced the road. He could hear a TV, see its ghostly glow in the sitting room, and he put one eye to the crack in the curtains. The news broadcast to an empty chair and a table, on which sat a dinner tray. There were books, plenty of books, and little that suggested the attention of a woman: everything pointed to a comfortless life of contemplation — Don’s. The embers of a fire burned behind a guard, and a pile of moving boxes was stacked to the right. George had come just in time: he was moving out. On the mantelpiece, a large carriage clock had stopped at ten minutes past midnight. That wasn’t the real time, but it reminded him that he had to be back in school before his absence was noticed, and that he still had to tackle the driveway again.