by Jan Mark
At the back of the shop and almost hidden in the shadow behind the post-office grille, a small old lady was watching television on a portable set that stood on a cardboard box at the end of the counter.
‘That’s the schools’ broadcast,’ she said, when he came round to pay. ‘I always watch the schools. Why aren’t you at school?’
‘We’ve only just moved in. We came yesterday,’ said Andrew. ‘I’ll go to school next term.’
‘I never went to school at all,’ said the old lady, unpacking the basket. ‘I was too ill. I was ill all the time I should have been at school. I got better though, soon as that was time to leave. The day I should have left, I got better in no time. I can add up, though. Two pounds, five shillings and sixpence. I don’t need a cash register.’
Andrew had been working out the total as he went round in case he didn’t have enough money. ‘Two pounds, twenty-seven and a half pence,’ he said.
‘Two pounds, five and six,’ said the old lady. ‘In money. Do you like school?’
‘Not much,’ said Andrew.
‘You’d better get ill, then,’ said the old lady. ‘I had a weak chest. Nobody could prove different.’
‘I think they could nowadays,’ said Andrew. ‘They’d cure it, too.’
‘Too clever to live, doctors,’ said the old lady. Andrew returned home, envious for the days when you could invent an illness for years at a time and never get caught.
When he got back he told Mum about the old lady in the shop and how she had managed to avoid going to school. As soon as he had finished he saw that he would have been wiser to say nothing. Talking about school had given Mum ideas.
‘If you’re going to school this term I’d better drop by and see the headmaster,’ she said. ‘He’ll probably let you start at once.’
‘I don’t want to start at once,’ said Andrew. ‘It’s only about two weeks to the end of term. Can’t I just have a long holiday?’
‘He’ll wonder if you don’t turn up,’ said Mum. ‘Because Dad wrote and told him you’d be coming. I’ll see to it tomorrow.’
Andrew lifted Ginger on to his lap and tried to play with him but he had a nasty, sucked-away feeling inside, all the way down from his ribs to his knees. He wished that he could go pale and sweaty when he felt ill, so that people would know just how ill he was. He put the cat down and managed, at the same time, to take a look at himself in the bathroom mirror which was propped against the dresser, waiting to be hung. He looked as healthy as he had feared, especially with his face pink from being upside down. If he suddenly developed a weak chest he would be rumbled at once.
‘If you start now,’ said Mum, ‘you might make a friend or two and then you’ll know your way about, next term. Anyway, I don’t think that this school will be quite the same as your last one.’
‘Certainly not,’ said Dad. ‘I drove past it when I came to look over the house and I distinctly saw people in the playground, walking upright.’
‘Everybody walks upright,’ said Andrew.
‘Not at the Gasworks,’ said Dad. ‘Their knuckles scraped the ground. The evening air was rent by the cries of the First Eleven, swinging through the girders on their way to the playing field. The Second Eleven went on all fours.’
‘It was the Glasswell, not the Gasworks,’ said Andrew. ‘It was named after the mayor, or somebody dead, or something.’
‘Glasswell, Gasworks, let’s face it, you didn’t think much of it,’ said Mum. ‘Better luck this time. I’ll go in tomorrow and arrange it.’
Next morning they all had something to do. Mum went off to the school in Polthorpe, Dad set about wiring up the hi-fi system and Edward settled down in his playpen to finish pulling the stuffing out of his woolly elephant.
Andrew went into the garden to assemble his patent, monococque, guinea-pig pen. It was his own invention; a tube of chicken wire, three feet across, with a circular piece of wire at each end. To erect it he had to cut away a rectangle of grass from the lawn, lay the wire lengthways on the bare earth and then put the turf back inside the pen so that the floor of it was grass and the guinea pigs could not burrow their way out.
He was rather proud of his invention. It was the only thing that he had ever invented and he wondered if there was a special magazine for guinea-pig enthusiasts to which he could send the plans. People all over the country might be glad to know how to make one, but he was afraid that if he did it might turn out not to be his own idea after all and that people all over the country would have built their own already.
The chicken wire had been badly dented in transit. The removal men had not noticed that it was meant to be a patent, monococque, guinea-pig pen and had stood the lawnmower on it. It took him a long time to straighten out the wire into a neat cylinder. When he had finished planting it he stood back to admire his work and observed that he had set it up directly under the washing line. When Mum hung out the washing she would have to climb over it. Not that she was likely to complain; it was the kind of thing she would do herself, but he knew that if he had been attending to the job he would have sited it better. All the time he had been wondering how Mum was getting on at the school.
He went indoors to fetch the guinea pigs and found that the loudspeaker cabinets had worked their way out of the living room and into the kitchen, trailing flex and crocodile clips. Dad was busy with a screwdriver in the doorway.
‘You weren’t thinking of making us a drink, were you?’ said Dad, without moving his lips. He was holding three strands of wire between his teeth.
‘If I switch on will you light up?’ said Andrew.
‘Try it and see,’ said Dad. ‘Just try it. You’ll have to make tea again, the percolator’s still packed.’
‘Good,’ muttered Andrew, thinking of the murky liquid that came out of the percolator. He went to put the kettle on but the soldering iron was plugged into the socket and little drops of solder lay all over the draining board. They looked like blobs of spilled mercury and reminded Andrew of an incident at his last school. Everyone in the class had borrowed a bit of mercury to play with while the chemistry teacher was out of the room, but it was Andrew who had upset the bottle.
‘I’ll make the tea when you’ve finished,’ he said and took the guinea pigs’ hutch outside. They were tired of being moved about and hung from his hands like old fur gloves when he lifted them into the pen. They felt uneasy on alien grass and sat sulking in the corner. He connected the hutch to the pen with a little tunnel of wire netting and put in fresh food and water, but they ignored him and grumbled together with their backs turned. He thought he knew how they felt.
He sat down on the grass with his back against the hutch and picked the mud from under his fingernails with the wirecutters. It was very quiet. Apart from the helicopter churning across the sky there was nothing flying today. In the stillness he became aware of a series of explosions in the distance. Every now and then there would be a loud bang followed by rolling echoes. While he was working the wind had changed and the latest bang sounded so close that he jumped and then got up, pretending that the jump had been part of the getting-up process in case anyone was watching through the hedge. He went indoors.
‘Dad, do you think there’s a rifle range round here?’ Then he stopped. Mum had come home. She was making the tea herself.
‘It looks a nice enough school,’ she said, when she saw Andrew hesitating in the doorway. ‘Nobody threw anything and one chap held a door open for me. You can start on Monday. You’ll be in class Ia for the rest of this term.’
Andrew felt a sad pain coming behind his eyes and went outside again. Monday was only five days away.
3. First Day, Worst Day
Dad offered to drive him to school on Monday morning.
At first he thought it was a good idea as it would give him less time to think about where he was going while he got there, but by Sunday evening he had changed his mind. Walking to the bus stop, getting on the bus, buying a ticket and getting off aga
in would lessen the shock when he arrived like lowering himself very slowly into a cold bath. He saw himself doing all these things and then he saw himself losing his fare, missing the bus, or getting off at the wrong stop, and he began to feel weak again.
They were all sitting round the kitchen table after tea. Dad was filleting a transistor radio among the breadcrumbs and whistling through his teeth. He could afford to whistle. He was still on holiday.
Mum was picking the badge off his blazer to replace it with the one she had bought in Polthorpe. The new one was red with a gold stripe across it. The old one had a lion and three bottles on it; at least they looked like bottles and he had never discovered what they were meant to be. It didn’t matter any more, he would never go back.
Dad was laying out transistors round the edge of his plate like someone playing at Cherrystones. Andrew’s plate was already heaped with pieces of wire and solder. It looked like a meal for robots.
‘Don’t brood,’ said Mum as she saw him staring at his plate. ‘The first day’s always the worst. After that, you know what to expect.’
‘You said that when I started my last school,’ said Andrew, ‘and that got worse and worse.’
He went up to his room and pushed the racing cars about for a bit. Tonight they looked tinny and feeble and he could see, more clearly than usual, the messy bits where his paintbrush had faltered. Then he reached into the almost empty tea-chest and pulled out his satchel. The strap had come off and there was a big stain inside, where someone had poured ink into it. Apart from the stain there was nothing but his pencil case and a piece of paper with a rude message on it. Andrew opened the pencil box and out fell a rubber, decorated with teeth marks. He tried to fit his own teeth into the dents, but they must have been bitten by someone else.
Then he found a lump on his neck and hoped that his tonsils might be swelling up but he couldn’t make them hurt, no matter how hard he prodded. He looked at his watch. It was a quarter to nine. He thought, in exactly twelve hours’ time the bus will be stopping in Polthorpe and I shall be walking up the path into school. The very thought was enough to give him a clutching sort of pain, exactly where he thought his heart must be, but it passed away, almost before he had time to feel it. He went over to the window and looked out, kneeling on the floor with his chin wedged against the sill. Down below, in the dusk, the gunman sauntered by, his ferocious face half hidden by the upturned collar of his coat.
Every evening, at half past six, he walked up the lane with a shotgun tucked under his arm. Sooner or later, they heard his footsteps as he came back again, still scowling at his boots and looking neither right nor left. Andrew feared the sight of him, not because he had a gun, but because he never spoke, never looked up, only passed in dark silence, up and down the lane.
Every time he heard the unexplained explosions rolling across the fields he thought of the gunman and once, when a very loud one woke him in the night, he saw a black vision of the gunman, standing at the gate and waiting, his gun to his shoulder.
He looked at his watch again. It was nine o’clock.
In exactly twelve hours time he would be in school.
Next morning he found that he didn’t have to walk up the path into school after all. Ia was housed in a mobile classroom at the end of the playground, next to the cemetery. The quickest way in was through a hole in the fence, behind the cycle sheds. He was given a seat at the back, by the window and when he looked out he could see the gravestones, white and shiny and all the same height, like false teeth: neater than the old tusks in Pallingham churchyard but not so interesting. He answered to his name on the register, paid his lunch money and was handed a timetable to copy, which he thought was a waste of time as it was only current for the next two weeks. After assembly he spent the rest of the day trailing round the school, looking for the right classrooms and wandering into the wrong ones and discovering that the timetable was inaccurate anyway.
No one had any time for him. The boys were busy and fast on their feet. The girls kept very much to themselves, gathering in giggling huddles in the playground and sitting on their own side in class: except for Jeannette Butler who was bold and sat with the boys, knocking them about with a strong right arm if they cheeked her.
However, by the end of the day he had decided that this school was better than the last one even though he didn’t like it. Nobody had offered to pull his head off, rip his coat or throw his shoes over the roof. On the other hand, nobody had spoken to him, either.
By Thursday afternoon, nothing had changed. Andrew was not entirely surprised. No one spoke to him because no one knew he was there. Every day he found himself with a different group and he only saw his own class all together at registration. After that they were split up for almost every lesson. Maths with Ix, English with Ic, Games with IIy, a lesson mysteriously entitled G.S. with Iz. At the end of that period he was no wiser about G.S. than he had been at the beginning. It seemed that the class was working from page 135 in Book Two while the teacher was on page 135 of Book Three. As both books had identical covers the lesson was over before anyone noticed. Andrew had had no book anyway, being advised to share with a boy in a pink shirt who kept his elbow firmly between Andrew and the book. When the bell rang Andrew grabbed the boy in the pink shirt before he could leave.
‘What was all that about?’
‘I dunno,’ said the boy, detaching his pink sleeve from Andrew’s grasp and treading on Andrew’s feet in order to be out of the room first. ‘Don’t ask me,’ he said. ‘We don’t usually have books. We don’t usually have Bacon-rind either.’
‘Bacon-rind?’
‘Mr Baker, Bacon-rind. He don’t know what he’s doing. Nor do we. Miss Beale ought to take us but she’s been away. She’ll be back tomorrow, Sir said.’
Andrew looked at his timetable and saw that G.S. was scheduled to take up the whole of Friday morning.
‘Here, what is G.S.?’ he asked, as they jostled down the corridor.
‘I dunno. General Subjects or General Studies, or something. We got Private Study on Fridays as well. Last lesson.’
Andrew thought he would make a joke.
‘When do we have Sergeant-Major Studies?’ he said.
The boy in the pink shirt thought this was so funny, or unfunny, that he gave at the knees, fell against the wall, hit himself on the head and staggered away down the corridor, reeling from side to side and howling with phoney laughter.
Andrew consulted his timetable and saw that it was time to go home. This didn’t necessarily mean that it was time to go home, but he decided to give it the benefit of the doubt and headed for the cloakroom.
4. Victor
On Friday morning Andrew arrived early for the lesson and stationed himself by the teacher’s desk, determined to get some information before he did anything else. While he was waiting, he looked round the room to see if there were any survivors from the last lesson and decided that there were at least three people that he had seen before: Jeannette Butler, the boy in the pink shirt and another boy whose appearance worried Andrew because he was sure there was something wrong with him. He was hideously swollen about the body but very thin in the face. Andrew leaned against the desk and wondered what kind of disease could possibly cause a person to become such a horrid shape. The boy’s spindly legs seemed hardly strong enough to support the rest of him.
‘You’re the new boy, are you?’ said someone beside him. ‘I’m Miss Beale, who are you?’
‘I’m Mitchell,’ said Andrew. ‘Andrew Mitchell, Miss.’ It sounded like a silly sort of tongue twister.
‘How do you like it here?’ said Miss Beale. Andrew didn’t intend to be side-tracked.
‘What are we supposed to be doing?’ he asked.
‘That rather depends on you,’ said Miss Beale. ‘In General Studies you can choose your own subject and follow it through. You’ll be rather behind the others but you can start on a project now and work on it through the holidays. That’s what most of the o
thers will do, if they haven’t finished by next week.’
Andrew found this hard to believe.
‘What are you interested in?’ asked Miss Beale.
‘Motor racing, guinea pigs,’ said Andrew.
‘Well, either of those would do for a start,’ said Miss Beale. ‘Perhaps Victor would show you round so that you can see how the others set about it.’ Andrew thought she wanted to be rid of him and when he turned round he found that a restive queue had formed behind him. Miss Beale directed him to Victor. He was the very fat boy with the very thin face.
Andrew was reluctant to go any closer. How could he stroll up and hold a normal conversation with anyone so deformed? He picked up his satchel and walked casually round the fat boy’s desk as though he just happened to be passing it. When he got close, Andrew realized that Victor was not fat at all. On the contrary, he was exceptionally thin; all of him, not just his head and legs. The fat part was made up of clothes. Andrew could see a white T-shirt, a red shirt, a blue sweater and a red sweater. Further down he wore a pair of black jeans with orange patches sewn over the knees and yellow patches on the hip pockets. Over it all he had an anorak so covered in badges and buttons that it was difficult to tell what colour it was.
In fact, he was not so much dressed as camouflaged. Even his hair seemed to be some part of a disguise, more like a wig than live hair, dusty black as if it had been kicked round the floor before being put on. It was so long at the front that Victor was actually looking through it. His ears stuck out cheerfully, like a radar device.
‘Miss Beale said you would show me round, to look at the projects,’ said Andrew.
‘Why, do you want to copy one?’ asked Victor, lifting a strand of hair and exposing one eye. ‘You could copy mine, only someone might recognize it. I’ve done that three times already.’