by Paul Read
Patrick stared across the grey playground. There was little he felt he could say to a colleague who’d just admitted to being trapped in her job for a working lifetime. The Monday morning blues. They both had it.
But she hadn’t punched a pupil.
Don’t go anywhere near him. Don’t look at him. Don’t even say his name in the register.
Harriet was still looking at him, in that odd way. He tried to sound breezy, normal, but knew he sounded like the drunkard who attempts to overcompensate by adopting an unconvincing impression of sobriety. ‘Why did you stay at this school?’ he asked.
‘They’re all the same,’ she whistled through three decades of throat polyps. ‘I’ve got a Year Team meeting this week. It’ll be full of keen newly-qualifieds with plans to be more positive with the youngsters. Letters of praise sent home when they fail to hit each other, that sort of thing… I just feel like I’m out of my depth sometimes, Patrick. Do you know what I mean?’ She seemed to be prying for something. Perhaps she’d sensed his discomfort, his fear.
Three storeys beneath them, he saw Denis.
He parted the legions of huddled lower years as he swaggered through his jungle, bobbing like a rap star, a newly rethroned king. Patrick couldn’t make out his usual expression of lofty enmity, or even if his face was bruised or not, but saw only the muscles in his neck, the firm lines of a prematurely broad back.
‘I’m beginning to,’ he replied.
Charlotte entered as the morning bell went.
‘Good morning,’ Harriet and Patrick both chimed.
‘No it isn’t,’ she spat.
Patrick opened up the pouch linings in an old body warmer with a rusting scalpel and carefully inserted ceramic tiles from the bottom shelf of the kiln into the slits. They wouldn’t stop a bullet but he doubted a knife could pass through, unless Denis was supremely lucky. In case the boy was after a kill, Patrick double-tiled the area in front of his hammering heart. He tried it on, beneath his jacket. It looked ridiculous, and was insanely heavy, but he would take no chances.
His teaching plumbed new depths. Fortunately, the kids were equally depressed to be back and were just about manageable. Some asked about the body warmer under his jacket but the lack of heating forgave him. Sometimes the tiles clanked together and, each time, to cover himself, he stamped down on the flooring as though it might be coming loose. He was vaguely aware that the kids were looking at him more strangely than usual.
When the time came, the Elevens began lining up. Sophia now had Miley Cyrus hair. Carlo’s chin looked like he’d glued individual hairs onto it. Jenna’s skirt had lost another two inches.
And there he was, near the back, alone.
He looked straight ahead, unreadable, untouchable. He seemed to have grown again, out as well as up.
‘Come in,’ Patrick squealed, standing at the door until the last few were due in and then slipping inside, so the majority of the class formed a human shield alongside him as Denis entered. His jacket clanked.
Denis found his seat, shrugged his bag off onto the floor.
‘Today, um… Well, today… Let’s see… Happy New Year…’
Denis sat inspecting his large, powerful hands.
Patrick tried to explain to the group that they were to begin their mock exam preparation today, showed them the paper, some past examples. He was pleased the pupils were listening, though it began to dawn on him that they were simply shocked by his appearance. As the clock ticked round, he waited for the insults, the threats, someone to throw a chair.
Nothing. Not yet.
Unusually quiet, the class began their brainstorms. Matthew Keane’s empty seat was a reminder of Denis’ unproved sociopathic tendencies, as the assailant in question sat there chewing the end of his pen, his eyes leaden with… Anger? Apathy? Hurt? It was like trying to decipher the soul of a statue. Nothing lurked within, and no clues gave anything away on the outside.
Sophia put up her hand.
‘Sir, can I make an appointment for Wednesday?’
Reluctantly, he slid the parents’ evening form round the room as the pupils selected an appointment time and jotted it down in their planners.
He hated parents’ evenings more than he hated marking. Or teaching. Or the getting out of bed.
Jenna looked at the paper, then at him.
‘Is there any point me filling this in, sir?’ she asked, her eyes round with sarcasm. ‘I mean, since you and my mother are…?’
‘Probably not, no.’
He passed the sheet on to Hamza.
Soon, all except Jenna and one other pupil had filled in their timeslot. It sat in front of Denis, unnoticed.
Patrick stepped forward to take it back as Denis snatched out for the form. Casting his apathetic gaze over the available times, the boy chose a slot before skimming it back across the table to the teacher without a word.
‘Thanks,’ Patrick said. The tiles in his body warmer ground together, then gave out a loud clink as one fell through into the pouch underneath. Jenna looked at him under heavy lids that seemed to confirm a mortal disgust.
‘Denis, you have thing on your face?’ Cosmo asked, in his delightfully mangled English.
The room, silent before, was an instant, fearful vacuum. Cosmo smiled dumbly at Denis.
‘I used to have a harelip,’ Denis stated, calm, composed.
‘No. Your eye.’ Cosmo pointed to his own, left eye.
Patrick saw now. The bruise had retreated over Christmas, but could still be seen around the socket in the form of a faintly blotched, rash-like contusion. Denis put his finger to it, then observed the sailing clouds out the window. Nothing was said.
Somehow, time passed.
When the class stood as one on the bell, Patrick jumped in shock. The pushing back of stools was the scrape of fingernails on chalkboards.
Patrick swam back to reality. It was lunchtime and he was sitting on the toilet.
He couldn’t remember the previous, sleepwalked lesson. He could barely remember the last seven years, how they’d passed in a drowned heartbeat of time.
What was he supposed to have made of that last hour? On the surface, nothing had changed. Denis wasn’t, for the time being, dragging Patrick’s broken body through the alleyways of Union City. But it was a false victory. The white bone of reality had been revealed to Patrick. He was a dead man walking.
Had Denis even spoken? Had he looked his way at all? What the hell had happened? And how long had the inevitable retaliation been delayed for? And why?
Patrick almost wished Denis had attacked him.
He stared at the back of the toilet door and listened without listening to the footsteps, the locking doors, the unbucklings. He considered, in that most unsanitary of environments, the infinity of time which had passed before his birth and the infinity of time which would follow his death. He considered the notion that he was here, by the remotest probability, at this living, breathing moment, this tiny, tiny snatch of time, and he screamed out silence. He knew he should have been out in the world, making things happen. Living his life. So much time had passed already.
It had been so promising, once. The move to London. The formation of the band. Meeting Ana. Then, ashes. What had happened to those dreams?
But dreams, of course, aren’t real. Civilisations aren’t built on fantasies and dreams can so easily dry up and blow away.
The footsteps. The flushes. The expulsions. Some of the staff washed their hands, some didn’t.
The snows came again, singing over the sharp lines of Union City, feathering the estate with the unfamiliar presence of nature.
Trudging home, Patrick rang Ana’s mother.
The harsh, intermittent buzz of an international call sounded, before being answered by a Spanish voice.
‘Ana?’
‘No. Lo siento. Esta es su madre. ¿Quién llama?’
The stupid cow knew exactly who it was. ‘It’s Patrick, Adana. Can I speak to Ana please?’ He didn
’t want to speak to Ana, he wanted to speak to Danny. It felt to him sometimes that it had never really been Ana he’d wanted to spend time with, not once Danny had learned to talk and fight and draw and dream. That was almost definitely why they weren’t together any more.
‘She no here.’
‘Any idea when she’ll be back?’
‘She no say. She in England. They no here.’
‘You’re wrong. They flew back yesterday.’
It must be a translation issue, he told himself. Or maybe Ana was there in the room but just didn’t want to speak to him.
He hung up when he began receiving another call. It was Sarah. He deliberated, then answered.
He might have imagined it, but he thought she sounded relieved. ‘Hello. I thought you’d died.’
‘I was away for Christmas. Sorry, didn’t I tell you?’
She asked him how he’d been, enquired as to his holiday, and he asked her if she’d tried to call him often and she replied, ‘Only a couple of times’. He knew this was a lie; he’d counted at least ten attempts in the aftermath of their hotel date.
‘Jenna’s at her father’s tonight. Why don’t you come over?’
He paused, looked along the pathway that led to the end section of the estate, the ground upon which he’d stood and thrown his fist at his least favourite Year Eleven pupil.
‘What’s the address?’
He walked out onto Albert Road and hailed a minicab.
The driver had such tired eyes, and the luggage underneath them was so circular, it was as though he wore spectacles of flesh. ‘Where you going, fella?’
Patrick recited the address.
‘Bateman block? You must be kidding.’ He powered off, leaving Patrick by the roadside.
Assuming the journey was such a short one it wasn’t worth the boorish taxi driver’s time, Patrick tugged up the collar of his coat and headed into the estate on foot. He found a crude council map on the corner of Stetson block. Bateman seemed to be seven blocks on.
He’d never plunged so deep in-between the high-rise of Union City before and couldn’t believe how identical every block, quadrangle, alleyway and balcony looked. The corner of the estate he knew from his walk home had infinitely replicated itself, every confused and criss-crossing walkway an example in déjà vu, with only the names of the blocks and the graffiti changing. He might have been back where he started for all the variety he was afforded in the snow, slanting and drifting across a bloating moon. As water crept into his shoes through high-street stitching, he creaked hesitantly across packing ice in the manner of an octogenarian.
Unbidden, ‘Danny’s Tune’ sought Patrick out. He rolled it around his mind before humming it to life. It calmed him, and the woes of Highfields retreated like figures in the snowfall. He added another verse.
And though you’re hardly
Here with me
My love for you flows
Constantly
He was about four blocks into the conglomeration of shoebox silhouettes, very near Sarah’s flat, when he passed two hooded shadows.
He kept his gaze low and walked as fast as the snow would allow. Inevitably, dozens of snowballs, hardened into ice by hot mitts, pelted him until his song was lost.
Round the next corner, the rest of the gang lurked.
There were seven of them, liveried in tracksuits and attitude, and they waited like a checkpoint militia, silent, expectant. Most of them were tooled up: one held a golf club, another at the far end of the line had gone for the traditional baseball bat. They all wore bandanas across their faces, eyes showing in thin, ninja slits.
Patrick approached, keeping to what he assumed was the path. The tinny, rapid sound of hip-hop rang out from an iPhone as the snow gave out compacting squeaks beneath his shoes. Snowflakes were black ash against the white night sky.
The golf club kid, broad-shouldered and tall, stood up from his place on a low wall segregating refuse bins from the residential area, and walked slowly towards Patrick until he blocked his way. He wore a grey and white Palestinian-style scarf across his face and he bounced his club, once, twice, three times against his leg. The eyes were brown, cynical, familiar.
The taste of fear was bile in Patrick’s throat.
Denis sidled right up to a paralysed Patrick and grabbed him by the elbow, as one might an elderly relative. He steered him through the quadrangle. It was civil but urgent and Patrick had no choice but to obey.
As he was led through the masked gang he noticed a couple were female. One of whom quivered in her too-short school skirt, beneath a fur coat and a girly-pink bandana. He hoped Jenna wouldn’t recognise him in his own inadequate winter gear. Or maybe it wasn’t Jenna. Wasn’t she supposed to be at her father’s?
To Patrick’s surprise – and towering relief – the grip on his arm was suddenly lessened. The boy’s footsteps dissipating behind him, he squinted into the blizzard. The estate had transformed its dimensions in the snowy dark, and Patrick was no longer sure about the direction he was supposed to go. Crunching on, he pondered his release; the ironclad atmosphere hinted at something about to happen, something big, uncivil, dangerous – was his adult presence a threat?
As he mused, the word ‘Bateman’, writ large beneath graffiti on a sign half-screwed into brickwork, loomed out of the murk. He counted the door numbers up to Sarah’s flat and was about to mount the steps towards a fracturing balcony when the worry that Jenna was observing span him back to face the youths.
Dissolving in a filmic whiteout, the gang were already just formless spectres behind the soggy, bright night.
FOUR
‘You look shaken. What’s up?’ Though her broad smile betrayed just how pleased she was to see him again, Sarah’s eyebrows surged into a pincer of concern. ‘Those hoodies at the end of the street again?’ She brushed ice off his shoulders and slapped the front door closed. Her skirt was shorter than he’d ever seen her daughter’s.
‘There were a few kids, yeah. Nothing worth stressing about. I’m a pro.’
There was no embarrassment about where she lived; inside it was bigger than his own flat, tidier, cleaner, more contemporarily furnished. Only the view bordered on war-torn. She took his coat and hooked it behind the door alongside others. Her fake fur was absent – did mother and daughter share the same coat?
‘Does Jenna ever hang around with that lot?’ he asked, jerking his thumb back at the snowflakes twisting to earth outside.
Sarah fired him a sideways look. ‘Of course not,’ she almost snapped, indicating the way to the front room.
On the coffee table sat a few weeks-old newspapers, their supplements unthumbed. Patrick got the impression from her dusty CD pile that the genres – indie, sixties rock and roll, lots of greatest hits – represented old tastes. He couldn’t locate his own debut album, which she’d claimed to love. The books dotted about might easily have been Jenna’s GCSE texts – Austen, Brontë, Plath – and he spotted all seven Harry Potters and the Fifty Shades trilogy. The films were either rom-coms, foreign language or starred Audrey Hepburn. A man had never lived in this home.
Patrick noticed some pages of hand-scribbled notation on a table and, following his eyes towards them, Sarah hastily swept the sheets onto a nearby chair, albeit in considered, tidy fashion.
‘Boring, job-related stuff…’ she explained.
From the mantelpiece a young girl smiled down, the traditional school portrait of big teeth in front of a clouded surface. A pink-costumed Barbie beside the photo struck Patrick as an odd memento of Jenna’s childhood, or at least a peculiar place to store it.
A noise from outside, like a violent folding of metal.
‘What was that?’
Patrick drew back a curtain and peered through the whiteness to see the gang in the quadrangle below, uniformly dressed in grey-hooded nonchalance. There were eight – no, nine – of them now, doing nothing, waiting, braving the inclemency. Perhaps it was the sheer fact that they were out, an auda
cious safety in numbers, that transmitted hostility. One sat upon a bike, smoked a cigarette and kicked at litter from his saddle as though playing some urban game of polo while others sprayed tags on a bin. They still held their makeshift weapons, rapiers for the teenage rulers of the estate. How old were they? Fourteen? Fifteen? When Patrick was their age he was still impressed by kids who could ‘round the world’ their yo-yos. Where were their parents?
Jenna – or the girl who closely resembled her – was nowhere to be seen.
‘Doesn’t this annoy you? The noise?’ One of the group was battering a litter bin with a cricket bat, as though sounding an alarm, or summons.
‘I’m immune now,’ she said. ‘People complain but nothing ever comes of it. The police will only come if something massive happens. I worry about Jenna, of course, but… She stays out of trouble. It’s just how it is round here.’
He stared into the swirling snows. ‘How long have you lived here?’
‘Oh, forever…’
‘It must be difficult…’ he said, taking in the blackened carcasses of an unwanted mattress and sofa, the sulking sky above an asphalt playground that was once brightly painted. ‘I know how draining, financially, emotionally, a separation can be, even when the parties concerned are determined to… Sorry. I didn’t come round to discuss social anthropology, did I?’
But that last question, and its vaguely licentious edge, seemed inappropriate. He doubted Sarah was going to lead him straight to the bedroom, especially after their previous failed tryst, and yet the way she looked at him worried him slightly. There was hunger there. And something else…
‘I mean, what did you want to talk to me about?’ he rephrased.
‘Oh. Nothing. Just wanted to see how you were.’ She took a step into him and he dropped the curtain. ‘I was thinking about you quite a bit over the last few days.’