The Heat of the Sun

by Rain, David

  Cubicle number thirty was desecrated. First the silken quilt was hacked with knives, set alight, pissed on, then flung from a window. Obscene additions covered the colourful pictures. Jubilantly, fellows flung Trouble’s phonograph records like discuses up and down the corridors, inundating the brown linoleum with a jagged sea of black.

  They smashed the phonograph too.

  In study hall and at dinner, Trouble sat alone. Of the acolytes, none remained. True, some had lingered – the Townsend twins had been the last to hold out – but the burden of conformity was too much. To take Trouble’s part was to invite assault, derision, the vilest accusations. For a few days fellows shook their heads, wondering how Trouble had taken us all in; then none spoke of the past any more. Trouble might never have enchanted any of us.

  The masters did not know what was going on. The world of the boys, like the secret lives of animals, unfolded beneath their awareness. If Mr Gregg thought again of the incident with the blackboard, he must have seen it as an isolated outrage, not the first in an evil chain. In class, Trouble betrayed little, sitting in silent dignity. The stares, the whispered jokes, the compasses stabbing his buttocks, came only when the master’s back was turned.

  One afternoon, as snow fell thickly, Mr Gregg made us read aloud from Cymbeline. The scene was a long one and the class soon grew restless; besides, Mr Gregg had assigned a part to Trouble. Guffaws, barely suppressed, accompanied every speech that Guiderius delivered.

  In the scene, Guiderius and Arviragus, the king’s disguised sons, conduct a burial service in the woods for Imogen, whom they falsely believe to be dead as well as a boy; that she is their sister is also unknown to them. Neither the pathos nor the absurdity of the situation infused our reading. Trouble was dutiful, his voice clipped and passionless; Elmsley, as Arviragus, sounded uncommonly nervous, stumbling often, as if in the mere act of playing a scene with Trouble he had compromised himself.

  Trouble intoned:

  Why, he but sleeps:

  If he be gone, he’ll make his grave a bed;

  With female fairies will his tomb be haunted,

  And worms will not come to thee.

  The snorts were loud. Mr Gregg looked up from his book.

  Elmsley replied, stumblingly:

  With fairest flowers,

  Whilst summer lasts, and I live here, Fidele,

  I’ll sweeten thy sad grave.

  Eight fellows had speaking parts. I was one of them, and we all had to stand. I resented this; I was the Soothsayer, who speaks only when the scene is almost over. Outside, glaring whitely under the pale sun, snow covered the playing fields like an intimation of death.

  We had reached the part where Guiderius and Arviragus sing their famous funeral song. Trouble had the first verse. At the direction Song he paused. Someone stifled a shriek.

  ‘Just read it, Mr Pinkerton,’ said Mr Gregg.

  Suddenly I was alarmed. Trouble faced the class. In fascinated, confused longing, we all gazed back at him. From the first I had sensed his magic; now, as if all along he had been biding his time, waiting for his moment, the magic reached out to touch us all.

  Mr Gregg looked puzzled. Then Trouble began to sing:

  Fear no more the heat o’ th’ sun,

  Nor the furious winter’s rages;

  Thou thy worldly task hast done,

  Home art gone and ta’en thy wages.

  Golden lads and girls all must,

  As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

  On the first lines, Trouble’s voice wavered; after that, the tone became assured. I slumped into my seat, pinned down as if by oppressive gravity, yet something in me struggled to escape, like a bird that flurries at the bars of its cage. Trouble delivered the song slowly, giving each word its due in a clear, soaring tenor. The song, in all its melancholy beauty, might have been a summation of all that life could hold. The setting, I realized later, was the one by Sir Hubert Parry: I would come to know it well.

  The second verse was for Arviragus; then the two had alternating lines. Elmsley looked about him. Terror flashed in his face, and he dissolved into the resignation of the damned as Trouble pushed aside an empty desk, advanced upon him, and draped an arm across his shoulder. Elmsley could barely move his lips; it was Trouble who sang his parts, with Elmsley propped beside him like a ventriloquist’s dummy:

  Fear no more the lightning-flash,

  Nor the all-dreaded thunder-stone;

  Fear not slander, censure rash;

  Thou hast finish’d joy and moan.

  All lovers young, all lovers must

  Consign to thee and come to dust.

  When the song was over, there was silence, and I wondered what it meant. Time, it seemed, was stranded in its flight, as if a pendulum had swung high, hovered, and refused to sweep down. We had been lifted out of ourselves. The fellow who had sung was no schoolboy victim, fresh from being tripped up on the stairs; the fellows who had listened were not the tormentors they had been and would be again.

  Then came the applause. Who began it I cannot say; first one pair of hands struck softly, slowly together, then another and another, until the sound surged across the room like thunder, sweeping us all into its startling grip.

  That evening it was my turn to be chapel monitor, readying the chapel for morning service. All except the most pious fellows resented this task. It was worst in winter. Situated apart from other buildings at the bottom of a sloping lawn, the chapel was cold enough to make me shiver even as I swept the aisles, polished the brass, changed the candles, and adjusted the hymnals in scarf, gloves, and overcoat.

  I was anything but thorough. There were meant to be two monitors: Trouble had been rostered with me that evening, and I had not been able to find him. I was angry. I had left my tasks too late and it was time for dinner.

  Only as I was about to leave did I pause, slumping exhaustedly on the front pew. And what, I wondered, had become of Trouble? When the bell had rung and Mr Gregg’s class had spilled into the corridor there had been jokes, jostlings, but feeble ones; Trouble strode away, and not a single fellow tried to hold him back.

  Still his song disturbed me. In the chapel, the melody came back to me, its strange beauty burning into me like a brand. I gazed up at the lectern, at the crucifix, at the high windows. Fugitive sunset flashed through stained glass and, resting my chin on my ashplant, I felt myself slipping into violet eyes, into a dark brightness where questions hovered over me like imponderable hanging fruit.

  I had hauled myself to my feet and was about to trudge back down the aisle when I heard a groan. At first I thought it was the wind, but the groan came again, and I swivelled towards the altar. Perhaps someone waited there, watching me, setting me up for some cruel joke, but I stumped in that direction all the same. Carpet, thick and blood-red, sank beneath my boots. White linen concealed the table, dropping at the corners in papery folds.

  For a third time I heard the groan, a sound of pain. I paced around the table. Oh, but I had not been thorough!

  Trouble lay on his side, doubled over.

  I prodded him with my ashplant. ‘Can you hear me?’

  ‘Damn, I must have passed out.’ He raised his head, wincing. ‘Who are you?’

  I reminded him of my name.

  ‘Leave me alone.’ He shivered violently. He wore no coat, no hat; his attackers must have set upon him in another building, then carried him out to the chapel and left him here.

  ‘You’re blue with cold,’ I said. ‘Can you stand?’

  ‘Leave me,’ he said again, and coughed.

  ‘You’ll have to go to the infirmary. I’ll get help.’

  ‘No!’ He reached up, grabbing the edge of the table; I thought he would pull down the cloth, candles and all, and I flustered about him, but he waved me away. Like a drunkard, he staggered down the steps and crashed into the railing before the first pew. He stood swaying, holding it tightly.

  ‘You’ll catch your death.�
�� I tugged away my scarf, struggled out of my coat. ‘Here, let me help you.’

  Had Trouble shouted at me, I should not have been surprised; but he turned, pliantly enough. Bundling him into my outdoor things, I realized anew how small he was. Blood glistened darkly against his blond hair.

  In the chapel porch, we paused. The snow had stopped falling and lay beneath the moonlight in pillowy drifts. From the dining hall, across an upward slope of whiteness, vertical strips of light shone through cracks in the curtains. The infirmary was further still: across a quadrangle, two flights up.

  ‘Careful on the steps,’ I said. ‘It’s a bit of a way.’

  He said to me suddenly: ‘Who are you? Who are you, really?’

  ‘Come on, you’re light-headed. Infirmary!’

  ‘No, no infirmary.’ He strode towards the dining hall, and all I could do was try to keep up. In the vestibule, he paused. Before us stood a set of swinging doors with portholes in the upper halves, like twin cheery faces. The clamour of voices, the clatter and scrape of cutlery, sounded from within.

  He pushed through the doors. A clear, wide track led to the dais at the end of the hall, where masters and senior fellows, Scranway included, dined together at the high table. Trouble progressed slowly, my too-long coat dragging on the floor behind him like a cape.

  Silence fell. Under sickly electric light, the dishevelled, bloodied Trouble was an apparition: Banquo’s ghost.

  At the foot of the dais, Trouble stopped. He stretched out an arm and pointed. His voice, when he spoke, was steady.

  ‘Fight me,’ he said. ‘Fight me yourself.’

  He dropped his arm, swayed, and crumpled to the floor. Cries broke out. Frantically the headmaster tried to quell the uproar, as Mr Gregg rushed towards the prone boy.

  They kept Trouble in the infirmary for three days. The cut on his forehead was long, but not deep; his ribs were bruised, but none was cracked, and he had caught a chill. On the afternoon of the second day, I visited him. I found him sitting up against pillows. Circling his temples was a white bandage. He held a pen and resting on his thighs was a portable escritoire, with a sheet of paper at the ready.

  ‘A visitor. Isn’t that dangerous?’ he said.

  ‘For anyone else, perhaps.’

  ‘Compassion for the cripple? I wouldn’t bet on it. How’s Eddie Scranway?’

  ‘The masters wondered why you pointed at him,’ I said. ‘Scranway was in class all that afternoon.’

  ‘I was light-headed. You said so.’

  The infirmary occupied an attic under the eaves, with creamy walls sloping between dormer windows. I thought of the hospital ward where I had lain for weeks in Paris. I hated hospitals. I hated sickrooms. I never wanted to be in a sickroom again. ‘They must have asked who did it, didn’t they?’

  ‘Do you think they want to know?’

  There were five other beds, four of them empty, pillows crisp as untrodden snow. A mousy boy slept in the bed next to Trouble’s; disturbingly, he reminded me of Billy Billicay. Under the window gleamed a spindly hoop-backed chair. I perched on the end of Trouble’s bed. ‘I don’t know how you stand it,’ I said. ‘How can you stand what they’ve done to you?’

  ‘Don’t you think I deserve it? You’ve heard the stories.’

  ‘Stories are stories.’

  ‘Oh, the test paper, that’s true. Maybe it was stupid of me, but it seemed so unfair, Scotty being kept out of officer training, all for the sake of some silly set of questions. But the diary? Come on! Let’s just say there are people who hate the senator. They’ll do anything to disgrace him.’

  ‘They failed, though. It wasn’t in the papers.’

  ‘But the story’s spreading.’ Cries, like birdcalls, echoed from the playing fields. The boy in the next bed shifted, murmuring; he must have been dreaming. Trouble reached for a handkerchief, sneezing into it lustily. The bed squeaked and shook, and I asked, too urgently, how the story could have spread. His nonchalance maddened me.

  ‘At Navy school, there was a fellow from Kentucky or Tennessee, somewhere like that, who’d never seen the sea before. They called him Landlubber and ragged him about what sort of sailor he’d make. His real name was Elmsley – Dan Elmsley. Guess whose cousin he is?’

  ‘I’ll kill that little rodent.’

  ‘Relax. It wasn’t Elmsley. Not really.’

  ‘What? Elmsley heard it from Cousin Dan.’

  ‘Well, he might have let slip a few things. But he didn’t do this.’ Trouble sneezed again. ‘Listen,’ he went on, between wipings of his nose, ‘there might be... a favour you can do for me. Would you like that?’

  ‘Depends what it is, doesn’t it?’

  ‘One moment,’ he said, and dipped his pen into the inkwell on the escritoire. As he wrote, a furrow appeared between his dark eyebrows; writing, I suspected, had never been easy for him.

  ‘There.’ He held up his paper and blew on it. ‘I think the bulletin board in McManus Two would be best, don’t you?’

  I took the paper carefully. Trouble’s handwriting was remarkably neat.

  CHALLENGE

  That BASTARD Eddie Scranway has terrified Blaze long enough. He is a COWARD, doing everything through his ‘assistants’. On Monday afternoon, Douglas Quibble and Frank Kane jumped me, beat me up, and left me unconscious. THEY ACTED UNDER SCRANWAY’S ORDERS. For that reason, I, B. F. Pinkerton II, hereby challenge Eddie (COWARD) Scranway to fight me OPENLY, with BOXING GLOVES (Queensberry Rules), in the gym at ten o’clock (p.m.) on the last day of term. I will NOT fight Douglas Quibble or Frank Kane. I WILL fight Eddie Scranway. May the best man win.

  Sincerely,

  B. F. Pinkerton II

  P.S. If Eddie Scranway does NOT accept this challenge, it is proof that he is a COWARD.

  ‘You like it?’ said Trouble.

  ‘I love it. But think! So it was Quibble and Kane. How can you prove Scranway put them up to it?’

  ‘You don’t think he did?’

  ‘He’ll deny it.’

  ‘To the masters? Let him! But you know and I know and Hunter the dog knows why Quibble and Kane do anything, ever. It’s time to call Scranway’s bluff.’

  ‘Queensberry Rules? Trouble, even I know that boxers are matched according to weight. And you’re tiny.’

  ‘So I’ll train. We’ve got three weeks.’

  ‘We?’ I said.

  ‘It’s a duel. I’ll need a second.’

  I laughed, but Trouble was in earnest. Solemnly then, I looked into his strange eyes, spat into my palm, and gripped his hand. I hated Blaze Academy: I hated all that it stood for. To champion Trouble would be to strike a blow against it. A blow for freedom. The boy in the next bed twisted, crying out faintly. Fever glistened on his forehead.

  As I left, I asked Trouble: ‘How did you know that song, anyway? The one in class.’

  ‘Oh, Mama took me to the play once. Boring as all hell it was, but I liked the song and learned it. Funny, isn’t it? Golden lads and girls all must, as chimney-sweepers, come to dust... Why must they? Didn’t us golden lads have any other career options in those days?’

  ‘Mr Gregg says it’s not about children going up chimneys. A chimney-sweeper was a name for a dandelion – blow on it, and it’s gone. And it’s as for like. Golden lads, like dandelions, end up as dust.’

  ‘Don’t we all?’ said Trouble. ‘Even Eddie Scranway.’

  ‘It’s a prank, it has to be!’

  ‘Talk about a massacre! Imagine it.’

  ‘Did Trouble even write it? I can’t believe it.’

  ‘Three years younger, six years smaller!’

  ‘He’s in the infirmary. Who put up this notice?’

  That evening, fellows clustered excitedly by the bulletin board in McManus II.

  ‘Say, where’s Scranway? Has he seen this?’

  As if in answer, the door swung open and Scranway entered with Hunter loping behind. The fellows fell silent; nervously, some shuffled away from the bulletin bo
ard.

  Scranway, taking in the situation at once, ripped the challenge from the wall. If I thought his face would change as he read it, I was wrong. Around us, voices sounded again, rising into a clamour:

  ‘You’ll wipe the floor with him, Scranway.’

  ‘Trouble’s crazy. You’ll show him, Scranway.’

  ‘Roll up, roll up for the fight of the century!’

  Scranway held up a hand and silence fell. He crushed the paper into a ball. He tossed it into the air and caught it. He dropped it, kicked it like a football.

  ‘Whoever posted that,’ he said, ‘can tell Trouble I’m calling his bluff. He wants a fight? He’s on.’

  Cheers erupted with volcanic force.

  In my cubicle, I found Le Vol sitting on my cot. He sprang to his feet as I entered.

  ‘What do you think you’re playing at? It was you, wasn’t it? You put up that challenge.’

  ‘Haven’t you always wanted a revolution?’

  ‘I’m warning you, that’s all. Trouble’s trouble.’

  ‘Maybe he’s my kind of trouble.’

  ‘Yes, if you want to get beaten to a pulp! It was bad enough, tagging after him in the dining hall when he put on his little show. People are talking. This is Trouble, remember – Trouble! Think what kind of person he is.’

  ‘I have.’ I slumped down on my cot. Le Vol’s face had flushed and I looked away from him. How ugly he was, how gangly and grotesque, with his fiery hair and ill-fitting uniform!

  ‘Give it up, Sharpless. I’m telling you as a friend.’

  Later that night, on the way to the bathroom, I found a ball of paper on the floor. No one was looking, so I picked it up, uncrumpled it, and folded it neatly. The challenge might have been a holy relic, something vital I had to keep.

  My duties as Trouble’s ‘second’ began soon enough. Whether he was rising early to run around the grounds, performing sit-ups or push-ups between classes, jumping rope, touching toes, propelling himself along parallel bars, lifting dumb-bells or pummelling a punching bag, I was with him, counting laps, counting repetitions, counting time.