The Art Teacher

by Paul Read

  ‘You know why you were released?’ It was N-Kid who spoke, mouth chewing his bandana. He sported a variety of vaguely Celtic shapes razored into close-cropped hair.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Want to know why?’

  A mobile was passed to Patrick as a video began playing, the sound a few seconds ahead of the images. He heard Highfields name-checked against a black screen. ‘Accusations.’ ‘Member of staff.’

  And then he saw Jenna.

  Sarah gasped and rejected Patrick’s hand, grabbing the mobile.

  The low quality of the speakers muddied whatever was said, but Patrick could make out Jenna’s school photo with her name captioned underneath. There followed a shot of the street in which Denis was killed, a police cordon flickering amid long diffused winds, and then Patrick appeared onscreen, in politico mode at the press conference. Finally, a reporter appeared, standing outside the same police station Patrick had just been released from, and an awkward, camera-hawking pause was broken when someone in the mixing room cut back to the studio.

  ‘What is this?’ Sarah asked. ‘I couldn’t hear a bloody thing.’

  Shanker snatched the phone back, pulled the knife up, casually inspecting its point. ‘Apparently your daughter made up the story about Mr Owen punching Denis because she was trying to make him sound “cool”.’

  Patrick rubbed his bruised eye. So, Jenna had stepped forward and announced the ‘punch’ as a fabrication of her own design? It was worse than feeble.

  ‘Why?’ she asked.

  ‘She says she’s in love with him.’ The boy laughed.

  And yet its lack of sophistication lent the announcement some credibility. Patrick hoped she hadn’t followed through on his unforgivable, desperate plan to frame the innocent Matthew Keane by replanting the gun, having done something far simpler and ultimately more ingenious to shake Meadows off. It wasn’t, however, something that would go any distance towards shrugging off those paedophile slurs.

  He reached for Sarah’s hand again but it was nowhere to be found. Perhaps that was part of Jenna’s plan too.

  ‘This explains why I was released from custody so abruptly.’

  ‘Problem is, what the fuck’s it got to do with Jenna?’ N-Kid asked.

  ‘Don’t ask me.’

  ‘I am asking you.’ The knife was returned to Patrick’s side.

  ‘Patrick, what’s going on?’ Sarah demanded.

  Patrick felt a twinge of remorse for accusing Jenna of involvement with this lot. It was clear they weren’t part of any intricate plot against him, that they didn’t have a clue who killed Denis. But they wanted honour. Revenge. The Union Souljas considered the police worse than fools and were taking matters into their own hands. That they were just boys made them doubly dangerous.

  ‘How did you get a taxi?’ he asked.

  ‘We can get anything,’ Dazz-Boy boasted from the driver’s seat. ‘We own this place. We picked you up outside the fucking police station, man.’

  ‘And how did these gentlemen convince you to come along for the ride, Sarah?’

  She turned from the window, knuckles white in her lap. ‘They said you’d sent a car for me. They said…’

  ‘Alright. That’s enough.’ N-Kid rephrased his question. ‘Why is Jenna Moris sticking up for you?’

  ‘Maybe what she said is true. Maybe she has a crush on me.’

  From her recoiling body language, Patrick knew this hadn’t impressed Sarah. It didn’t impress his kidnappers much either.

  ‘Don’t fuck about with us. Jenna’s not in the Souljas so she doesn’t have protection, you get me? Don’t make us go and ask her what’s going on. She won’t thank you for it.’

  ‘Why don’t you ask her? What’s it got to do with me?’

  ‘She means nothing to you? Fair enough. And what about her mother?’ N-Kid grabbed Sarah’s hair, twisting her head back against the headrest as Shanker leaned across Patrick and calmly placed the knife at her rippling throat.

  ‘No one knows what happened to Denis, okay?’ Patrick yelped. ‘Let’s not get ourselves all worked up.’ He attempted, fruitlessly, to play the senior, to turn the back seats of the stolen taxi into his classroom. ‘I’m the one who’s been at the police station and, between you and me, they don’t have many leads to go on. They don’t know. Believe me, I had nothing to do with the death of Denis, but I do, as you’re obviously aware, have connections to Jenna’s family.’ He indicated Sarah, quietly hyperventilating next to him. ‘Those connections are no doubt the reason Jenna’s backing me up. She’s doing it for her mother. Please leave the pair of them out of this.’

  The knife returned to Patrick’s kidney as Sarah massaged her neck, shaking with anger.

  They were no longer in the estate. From the window, Patrick could make out the new ‘riverbank’ apartments, an estate adjacent to the reservoir, glaring under the cold sun and, behind, the Shard’s silver incisor standing to attention some distance from the older constructions of St Paul’s and the BT Tower. London’s changed skyline had long ceased to represent the vista of promise The Forsaken chose for the cover of their debut album.

  Shanker asked. ‘Did you hit D-Man?’

  The three gang members looked at him in silence.

  ‘You weren’t… there, were you?’ he asked.

  ‘Weren’t where?’ asked Shanker.

  ‘Nothing. Forget it.’

  ‘Listen, man. Hitting someone ain’t killing them. You get me? But someone who goes around telling people they didn’t hit no one when they did ain’t exactly gonna be believed when they start saying they ain’t killed no one either.’

  ‘I really don’t…’

  ‘We ain’t the police. You know, we respect you more than we respect the police, and that’s saying something. You don’t have to pretend, man. Not to us. We’re inner circle.’

  ‘Fine, I hit him.’

  ‘We know. We was there.’

  Patrick tried to react coolly to this, as one might try to react coolly when the volcano on the horizon starts to rumble. But any facade of composure was shattered as the taxi abruptly turned left, then braked hard.

  ‘This is where you live, I believe,’ Dazz-Boy said, tapping the wheel.

  Patrick looked through the window to see The Heights. It was testament to Jenna’s announcement that no members of the press bothered to wait outside.

  ‘We’ll give you…’ N-Kid looked at his watch. ‘…two hours. Either you or Jenna has to take the blame. Understand?’ The knife was sheathed into Shanker’s pocket before he reached over and opened the door.

  ‘Why are you doing this?’

  No answer. For sport. Boredom.

  Patrick stepped out, followed by Sarah. ‘How can I find you?’ he asked.

  ‘We’ll find you,’ Shanker replied. ‘We want justice, yeah? Justice. That’s all.’

  The taxi skidded off in a black belch of exhaust fumes.

  ‘Ring Jenna,’ Patrick said. ‘Right away.’

  Sarah scrutinised Patrick as though looking at him for the first time, shook her head. When Patrick attempted to thread an arm towards her, she snatched it away.

  ‘Jenna clams up every time your name’s mentioned. And now this…’ He watched Sarah’s hands curl into fists. ‘Maybe I should’ve guessed something was going on. I saw the two of you whispering in the estate earlier, thick as thieves while the world revolved around you. You didn’t even see me.’

  ‘That was perfectly innocent, Sarah. You can’t possibly believe…’

  ‘Yeah? What were you talking about then?’ Traces of affection bled from Sarah’s face; she was a bad cover version of someone he desired right now. ‘…And the TV’s saying she has a crush on you. All this “She wanted Mr Owen to look cool, as cool as the gangs patrolling her estate” rubbish. And then these pricks with God-awful nicknames kidnap me and bang on about ‘D-Man’ and who killed him and…’ The anger had almost doubled her over. ‘Tell me what the hell’s going on, Patrick.’r />
  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because it’s more serious than you realise.’

  She stepped away from him. ‘It is connected to Denis’s death, isn’t it? Why is Jenna saying what she’s saying?’

  ‘She’s covering for me.’

  Her face opened in horror. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I’m covering for her.’ He was close to shouting. ‘Ring your daughter. Ring her now.’

  Sarah’s flat was empty. Patrick watched her slump on Jenna’s deserted bed and ring Izzy, who suggested she try Marie, who suggested she call Uche, who suggested she try Izzy again. She hung up and stared at the phone as though it had failed her. On their journey over, Patrick had explained everything and she looked up at him now with the blank dispassion of a fresh mourner.

  ‘If you go to the police, the gang’ll kill her,’ she stated.

  He gazed out the window at the starless, orange aurora over London. ‘Going to the police doesn’t feel like an option any longer. No one’ll believe Jenna’s self-defence story after all this.’

  ‘Even if the gang don’t kill her, it’s prison for sure.’ Detachment peeled from her, inaction giving way to the fires of injustice. ‘I’m going to go out and look for her,’ she resolved. ‘I can’t just hang around here.’

  Patrick walked back to her lounge and wilted onto the sofa. ‘They gave me two hours.’ He checked the numerals behind the shattered glass of his wristwatch. ‘That was thirty minutes ago. I think they’ve already got her.’

  ‘Got her? Where?’

  ‘I don’t know, but my time’s running out. Unless I tell the gang the truth they’ll kill me. I’m pretty certain of that.’

  ‘And if you do tell them the truth they’ll…’ She was at the door, desperation in every rabid aspect of her movement. ‘I don’t know what to do. You go and look for her.’

  He didn’t move from the sofa. ‘No.’

  ‘What do you mean, “No”?’

  Patrick could no longer contain himself. ‘Look at my feet. They’re fucking blue. Oh, and you know what? I woke up this morning to find I’d been suspended from work because the press are after my blood. But that was the best my day got because then I ended up being interrogated by the police and KIDNAPPED. You know, I’m actually beginning to miss the days when I was merely smeared as a child molester. And all of this – all of it – is because of your bitch daughter. No, I’m sorry, Sarah, but I’ve done my favours for that girl. I’m not bailing her out any longer.’

  Sarah walked slowly towards him. He felt the heat of her anger swell.

  ‘You should’ve left us the hell alone, Patrick. You should’ve left me the hell alone.’ She then strode to the front door, slamming it shut behind her and slapping forward the photograph of Millie on the mantelpiece. It fell to the ground with a sharp crack of glass.

  He consulted his broken watch again, then fixed his eyes on the front door she’d just departed through.

  After a few minutes, an unlikely change began to take place within Patrick. Deadlines had been set, sinister ultimatums drawn up – and yet his fear, quite tangibly, started to dissipate. His very isolation handed him an advantage.

  Something Jenna told him earlier gave him hope. She wasn’t part of the gang but evidently knew enough about its inner politics to appreciate that it was possible to leave the Union Souljas. Patrick doubted ‘leaving’ meant walking away – getting shot in the back was probably the easiest way to resign, or joining a rival crew – yet those notions of internal dissent certainly made the gang less intimidating. Maybe he was thinking too much like an adult, placing rationality above appearances, but even his kidnappers earlier had talked about ‘inner circles’, suggesting bosses and underlings, Denises and Matthews. The gang put up a united front but didn’t think with a unified mind. And Patrick knew full well how differing opinions could divide and sway even the closest of allies.

  After all, he’d belonged to a gang once.

  Lights and sound, building to a throbbing crescendo. Drugged by the power at his fingertips, he’d gazed down into a sea of mortal, adoring faces.

  To his left, Adam had been drunk and off-track, making up verses and slipping over rhyme, but the band had been strong enough to bring him back to safety. Even in the electric thrill of the moment, when things could have gone disastrously awry, no one had been troubled by Adam’s messianic wanderings into scat-poetry and the problems in the Middle East. This was their encore at the Reading Festival, the zenith of their career. Nothing had been able to stop them.

  Patrick had winked at a girl in the crowd as he disengaged himself from his instrument to the cheers of pissed kids celebrating GCSE results. Years later, Key Stage Four pupils would be shouting altogether less appreciative comments in response to his Art. The band had vanished into the crowds and slipped back into anonymity, but the buzz remained like an amphetamine in their collective system. Adam told him he loved him that night, high as the North Star, his pupils like the points of sharpened pencils. Three weeks later, Patrick was sleeping with his girlfriend.

  It was cruel how his memories of that night – arguably the moment he felt most alive – were kidnapped by injunctions into the then-future. The degeneration into teaching. The best friend turned love-rival. No single snapshot in time was pure, he’d learned; regrets worm their way even into paradise.

  But there was one aspect of his Reading performance no lost lover or career change could taint.

  The night after the gig, his father had called to remind him to send his mother a birthday card. This was how it had always worked; Patrick had never written down birthdays, or addresses, and relied on his father’s steel mind to jog his memory over family matters. They’d talked about nothing in particular, as fathers and sons do, but just before his father wound up the customarily brief call he’d said, ‘I was watching you on TV last night.’

  Patrick had made a self-deprecatory grunt. His father had some interest in early rock and roll but Patrick could never claim to have been educated, musically, by him and had never been able to rely on his tastes as any great barometer of quality. Elvis was commonly regarded as influential, as was Buddy Holly, but no one wrote any musicals on Clyde Hankins or Jimmy Torres as far as Patrick was aware.

  ‘I thought you were… alright, son.’

  Never had his father flattered him before, or expressed even a sniff of much longed-for pride in his son until this occasion. Dumbstruck by such mutiny in protocol, however meagre, Patrick had only managed a smile as the disconnected purr segued into the sing-song squeal of the telephone exchange’s reminder tone.

  The turn of Sarah’s key snapped him from his memories and it took a few seconds to swim back to reality. Torrents of expletives were launched at him before he had a chance to fully acclimatise.

  ‘I was trying to protect you. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Protect me?’ she yelled. ‘Or get into my knickers? I thought I trusted you, Patrick, but it turns out I don’t even know you. What kind of a person are you, to do something like this…?’

  Patrick stared at his hands. ‘I don’t know…’

  She looked over him with a kind of abstract curiosity. ‘Why are you still here?’

  He gazed up at her, as though seeing her for the first time.

  ‘Where should I go?’

  Reluctantly, Sarah walked forward and sat beside him in a stunned silence. Patrick looked at his watch again.

  ‘I need a moment,’ he said after a while, standing and crossing to the bathroom.

  Inside, he took out his phone and called Ana.

  ‘Hi, it’s me.’

  ‘Patrick, what the hell’s going on?’

  ‘Can you put Danny on, please?’

  There was a short pause, followed by a squeaky voice exclaiming, ‘Hello Daddy!’

  ‘Hey Danny, what you up to?’

  ‘I’m playing at the hotel. Mummy bought me a superhero and you can take the legs of Iron Man off and put the
arms of Hulk on and take the head of Hulk off and put the head of Doctor Doom on.’

  Patrick gulped back tears. ‘That sounds amazing. Danny, you know I love you, don’t you?’

  ‘Silly Daddy.’

  ‘It’s true. I don’t want you to ever forget that.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘More than I can ever say.’

  ‘You just said it.’

  ‘Yes, but more than I just said.’

  ‘That’s stupid.’

  ‘Whatever. Just remember though, yeah? I have to go now. Goodbye, Danny.’

  ‘Bye Bye Daddy!’

  He waited for Ana to take the phone.

  ‘Well?’ she asked, suspicious.

  Strength returned to his voice. ‘I’m sorry. I love you too. I always have.’

  Silence. When she next spoke, she sounded genuinely scared. ‘What’s going on?’

  He let the arm holding his phone drop, squeezed his eyes tight. The voice continued, ‘I could hear what you were saying to Danny, Patrick. What in God’s name is happening? You’re scaring us.’

  He pulled the phone back to his ear. ‘I just wanted to…’

  ‘To what?’

  Patrick swayed on the bathroom mat, avoided his own eyes in the mirrored cabinet. ‘I don’t know what I’m mixed up in here. I don’t know when I’ll next see you again. I’m going to do my best to stay safe but it means more to me, right now, that you’re both alright. Look after him, won’t you?’

  ‘Patrick Richard Owen!’ She was screaming now. He could hear Danny crying in the background. ‘What are you playing at?’

  ‘I have so much I want to say to him. I tried to write him a song but…’

  ‘You’re not making any sense.’

  ‘You know “Find the Ocean”?’

  There was a confounded pause. ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘Just play him that one day. It will tell him pretty much everything.’

  ‘Patrick!’ she screamed. ‘Patrick…!’

  He hung up just as Sarah’s doorbell tolled. With extreme hesitance, he left the bathroom.