by Paul Read
Sarah was standing in the hallway, her hunched body bracing itself, and they walked into the front room to see a series of shadows gathered outside. The endgame was coming.
‘Open it.’
Trembling, she unlatched the door and pulled it inwards.
‘Oh my God!’ She lunged forwards to embrace her daughter.
Jenna seemed to hang still and lifeless in Sarah’s arms, her eyes downcast, as ten or so masked individuals, some maybe as old as twenty, others as young as fourteen, stepped past the pair of them and strode to find their marks between the door and Patrick. He recognised the three from the taxi, near the front.
‘Good news,’ Dazz-Boy said. He was one of the older ones, the tip of a spiky tattoo crawling from his neckline. His eyes were green, sharp, dangerous, and Patrick felt sure he’d done time at least once. ‘She’s joined the Souljas.’
From Jenna’s expression, no one would have thought this good news at all.
‘So we all know now, don’t we?’ Shanker spat. ‘About D-Man. About what happened?’
‘Do we?’ Patrick asked, targeting Jenna with the question.
‘Now she’s in the gang she’s protected, right?’ Sarah asked. ‘You said she wasn’t safe before.’
Shanker nodded, an exaggerated, half-dance of a nod, his shoulders dropping slowly. ‘That’s right.’
So that was her fate. Her protection. The Souljas would cover for her, provide an alibi if necessary, but, now a member, she’d no doubt find it hard to leave or defect without risking death. The expression ‘ride or die’ came back to him from somewhere and then, lurking at the back of the group, he spotted a boy with an external fixator on his arm, a smile of ingratiating stupidity adorning his face. He wore his paint-smattered shoes. One by one, the Souljas claimed the vulnerable and stupid. Or the vulnerable and stupid joined for protection.
‘What was all this talk about justice earlier?’ Patrick asked. ‘Is this it?’
‘This is it,’ N-Kid confirmed. The whole gang seemed to grin. ‘Over. We all know where we stand. No need to bother the police, innit.’
Sarah’s daughter still wasn’t looking anywhere except her shoes. Slowly, she put her hand out for Patrick to shake. ‘Nice knowing you, sir,’ she said, as her gang fell about in laughter. This macabre parody of sociability was clearly part of her initiation. Any remaining sense of authority, or hope of fair-play from the gang, left Patrick.
Jenna retracted her limp hand and, one by one, her crew turned to depart. Impassive, Jenna swivelled to leave with them.
‘Jenna?’ It was Sarah who spoke.
Her daughter looked at her, then Patrick. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, and it sounded like she genuinely meant it.
The last to exit was Matthew, who lingered to sneer pathetically, as if the whole caper might have been his brainwave. His head was raised and his shoulders rolled in a simian hunch. Sarah didn’t close the door after him.
For a long time the pair stared into the black void outside.
‘They said she was safe. They said it was over. Patrick… What the hell just happened?’
What had been the threat issued in the taxi? One of you has to take the blame.
‘She’s safe.’
‘Do you think she told the truth?’
‘If I was in her shoes, I wouldn’t have.’
Sarah squinted into the night. She looked older somehow. Her skin was dry and her eyes brittle. ‘What… What will you do now?’
He shrugged an imperceptible itch of his shoulders. He didn’t know what he was going to do. He recalled the screams of Ana and Danny, how close he’d already come to losing them. Though he felt compelled to go to his family, the danger, absurd as it sounded, was surely only just beginning.
‘I need to get out of London, quickly,’ he mumbled. ‘But there are a few loose ends I have to tie up first.’
He looked back at her silhouette in the doorway, then stepped onto the cold walkway, spied immediately the gang at the far side of Bateman. Drinking. Jeering. Being teenagers. The taxi was there with its lights on, playing an abrasive wail of bad music through its speakers and casting indistinct spotlights on the floor. Jenna, bottle of beer in hand, was being spoken at by Matthew and was the only person looking Patrick’s way.
‘Patrick…’ Sarah whispered. ‘Be careful.’
The teacher made off, fast.
Keep walking. Don’t look back. Show no fear. Keep walking. Keep walking.
Keep walking.
With twenty metres to go before he left the block, the car stereo was muted. He didn’t even need to look over his shoulder to confirm every pair of eyes watched him, and as he stole through puddles of shivering water, and his own image shivered with them, he felt the rain of pure hatred upon his back and his quickening footsteps echoed off the walls like gunfire.
THREE
When the school was woken into boisterousness by the lesson changeover bell, Patrick strode to his door. He was amused to find pupils’ conversations stopping as eyes took him in with the mystery of a new species, a Victorian freak show. He’d returned unclean and deformed from his ordeal and people behaved peculiarly around him; Harriet had even dropped a mug of tea at her feet as his phantom skulked in that morning. Although she and Charlotte were gracious in his defeat, said the right things about how awful the last few days must have been, there seemed to exist the common feeling that he was damaged goods, that he deserved his ignominy. Weren’t there, they surely felt, just too many stories circulating to be ignored?
Patrick had gone to work to find he’d been replaced indefinitely by a supply teacher called Mr Beal who sported cream swirls of psoriasis at his temples and seemed the only person genuinely pleased to see him, on account of his Sevens falling silently into line, cattle-prodded by Mr Owen’s infamy. While Mr Beal’s lesson was in progress, Patrick disappeared into the kiln room and sought out Jenna’s clay head from the collection of Year Eleven sculptures.
It had dried now and one of her grey eyelids had fallen off due to a clumsy application of slip. He raised it above his head and hurled it to the floor, where it exploded to reveal the gun in the centre of a radiating star of powder and facial shards. Patrick plucked the murder weapon up, then stuffed it into his belt and buttoned his jacket over it. There was no way to get it out the school without setting off the scanners at the main entrance, and the exit behind the canteen was now also replete with the devices, thanks to the breaking and entering skills of his favourite journalist.
He walked back into the classroom and, for the last time, speculated on how conducive to creativity the view from his window might have been. The very name Highfields conjured up visions of windswept pastures, golf courses or country valleys, making this vision of a heavyweight estate lurking in mist something of an insult. Above Union City, the sky was a flat smudge of charcoal.
Mr Owen left his classroom for the last time, then entered the office to retrieve his guitar.
Christophe was teaching his Eights when Patrick entered.
‘Morning, sir,’ Patrick said, pretending not to see the Ofsted inspector sitting in the corner.
Observing the guitar poking over Patrick’s shoulder, Christophe attempted an insincere smile. ‘Hello.’ He instructed his class to read through page forty-two in their textbooks then found refuge under his postcard of François-Noël Babeuf. He said to Patrick, in a quieter voice, ‘Been a strange few days, no?’
‘Strange is an understatement. I got punched by a boxing champion, accused of being a paedophile, and a child beater, and a murderer. The police tore my flat to pieces, poked about under loose tiles, inside the cushions of my sofa. I got dumped by the first person I’ve liked in years. Oh, and a local gang want me dead.’ Christophe looked uncomfortable but Patrick didn’t care; hadn’t his colleague been the one who warned him nothing good would come from romancing the mother of one of his pupils?
‘Apart from that, everything rosy?’ Christophe attempted to sound bullish. A fe
w of the kids strained to listen in but the whole room, teachers included, were talking in whispers and the resultant blanket of white noise drowned any juicy details. ‘Do you think we could, maybe, talk later?’
‘That Homicide Inspector really had it in for me, you know,’ Patrick said. ‘Did you tell him about the video we watched on Matthew’s phone?’
‘I thought it might’ve been relevant.’ Curt. Defensive. ‘Perhaps, I thought, there were clues about the gangs in there after all…’
‘Yeah, well, he got all Batman on my arse in the interview room. Worked me into a state just to show up again with some bogus testimonies and fool me into a big reveal…’
‘Patrick, I’m in the middle of a lesson…’ The Ofsted inspector in the corner was shaking his head, scratching mysterious numbers onto his observation sheet.
‘Meadows asked you to inform me that a description of Denis’s killer was doing the rounds, didn’t he? Well, it wasn’t. He hoped I’d provide some information that tied me to the scene.’ An interviewed resident must have reported a hurrying, gold-trainered figure, but that was all Meadows had. ‘Unfortunately, you couldn’t leave it at that, could you?’
‘I don’t know what…’
‘Stop bullshitting me,’ Patrick whispered. ‘You told Meadows about me hitting Denis, probably palming it off as “rumour” because you were too interested in smoking that grass.’ Though his supplier’s stash had gone up in smoke, Patrick was pleased to note Christophe’s face betrayed no pain and his arthritic digits refused to hang gnarled or wizened by his sides; Denis’s cannabis was still in safe hands.
‘He was very persuasive,’ Christophe justified. He looked at the floor the way Jenna had done the night before. ‘Call it a professional judgement.’
‘I bloody knew it.’
‘I’m sorry. Really. I’m gutless. I don’t know how the press found out though. That wasn’t me.’
He could hardly blame Christophe for the convergence of events which had led them to this conversation. Patrick alone had put those unfamiliar clothes on, groped in the bleeding dark for murder weapons. Christophe had suspected Patrick of killing Denis, perhaps still did, and he wasn’t the only one.
‘Same reason they find out about everything else, I imagine. A leak. A link in the chain you thought you could trust.’
Patrick turned and swept from the Frenchman’s classroom.
Outside the gymnasium a sign announced, ‘Silence Please. Mock Exams in Progress’.
Patrick pushed open the door and Mr North, head of Year Eleven, looked him up and down without a smile then hurried to the other side of the gym, despite being in the only place on Earth, apart from gravesides and the London underground, where a conversation was impracticable anyway. A whiteboard revealed the test had thirty minutes left to run.
The students scratched in booklets as sun coursed through tiny triangular rips in old black curtains, sprinkling dust particles amongst the ancient woods and brickwork while teachers strolled the aisles, their shoes an unwelcome tick-tock in arrhythm with the large clock at the front. Patrick saw Hosam Mohammad gawping at the pair of legs beneath Kate Richardson’s desk. Sally Handley reapplied her nail varnish with Tip Ex.
Matthew was over by the wall bars, reading his test paper under a cloud of disdain. The boy inclined his head towards the teacher’s presence, wordless, still scripted by the silence of the gymnasium.
And there was Jenna. For a moment she and Patrick looked at one another, their complicity screaming in the electric stillness, their respective uniforms unkempt, unironed. He wondered if her peers turned from her the way his did from him, whether she heard the rumours repeated back in their silence. Patrick had experienced his fair share of abuse over the years so he fancied he knew what Jenna was going through, but to be called ‘a lying, time-wasting, adolescent fantasist’ by the very newspaper baying for his own blood twenty-four hours beforehand couldn’t have been pleasant. She, like him, had returned to school too soon. They both played the innocence game.
He walked swiftly across the polished parquet flooring and stopped at her side, aware of the phallic heaviness of the gun in his belt, the guitar strap across his chest. ‘Did you tell them it was me, Jenna?’ His voice was soft but whipcracked through the hall nonetheless.
Certainly the gang had passed on the opportunity to kill him in the estate the night before, but had they only decided against it because of the risk of witnesses? Because Sarah had been there? He searched for an answer in Jenna’s face, saw nothing but the eyes of an automaton avoiding his.
‘Patrick!’ snapped a voice behind him.
It was the first time Mr Hutchinson had used his first name. Colin, Patrick thought his headteacher’s forename might have been. Or Charles. Never before had he seen a face quiver with such fury.
Patrick marched towards him, splitting the sparkle of light behind climbing bars. ‘I resign,’ he announced.
‘Accepted,’ Mr Hutchinson growled, tugging him from the gymnasium into the main foyer.
PC Thomas was reading a Fantastic Four comic in his little cubicle behind reception.
‘Patrick’s leaving,’ the headteacher announced into sound holes drilled through protective Perspex.
It took the policeman a pretentiously long time to place the reading matter to one side. ‘Probably for the best,’ he said, without venom, emerging from his booth. ‘Let’s have a look at that guitar.’
Patrick handed over his Les Paul. ‘It’s been gathering dust in the office,’ he justified. ‘I thought I should leave the place as tidy as possible.’ The pistol burned at his hip.
‘Cost you a fair bit, I daresay?’ The Constable placed his fingers in the A major bar chord, strummed. ‘It’s out of tune,’ he said, twisting at the tuning pegs. Patrick explained that he hadn’t played the instrument for a long time.
Mr Hutchinson, incensed, ripped the guitar off PC Thomas and handed it back to its owner, who threaded the guitar strap over his shoulder.
‘See you around, gentlemen.’
Patrick walked through reception, passing into the security scanners. The alarm ripped throughout the foyer like the keening of some maligned robot.
‘Hold on,’ PC Thomas shouted.
The ex-teacher stopped. ‘Steel frets,’ he explained, then turned towards the door.
Patrick Owen left Highfields Secondary School for the last time, his heart in his throat, security alarms screaming all around him.
He placed the guitar in the armchair opposite and the gun on the coffee table, then sat looking between the two objects for a long time. The foam in his cushions spilled out where the police had poked about for justice.
Losing his job caused him little distress. Getting into education in the first place had been a premature idea at best, a lazy response to his degree and rudderless existence after being forsaken by The Forsaken, and he could hardly be expected to carry on patrolling the same playground as Jenna any longer, or teach his GCSE class with Denis’s name scratched out in the register. What hurt most was losing his first meaningful human relationship since Ana hitched up her skirts and expatriated to Latin America.
Before he’d realised what he was doing, Patrick had snatched up the gun and rammed it in his mouth. It tasted like blood, dental fillings.
For some while he sat with the weapon against the roof of his mouth, finger on the trigger, daring himself to play the dangerous odds that separated life and death. He had no idea if a bullet sat in the chamber or if the gun would even fire any longer but it didn’t matter: the suggestion of suicide hypnotised him with its sheer simplicity. Escape was an intoxicating gamble.
He looked around the living room, over the black blur of the gun. This was the life he had built for himself, the summary of his time on Earth. A cactus sagged on the windowsill. The tomes on art theory were fifteen years past their relevance date. The deskbound Waterman pen had never signed an autograph. The room was a poor suicide note.
He wondered how m
any days of unanswered phone calls from Ana or his mother it would take for him to be discovered with the murder weapon in his mouth. If that didn’t close the Denis Roberts case, nothing would.
At this thought, the firearm slid from his mouth and Patrick wrenched it towards a sofa cushion, pressing the trigger. It didn’t even click; the entire firing mechanism had melted. He cast the gun to his side, drowsy but in control again.
Taking out his mobile, he rang Sarah’s number. The answer-phone kicked in after one and a half trills.
‘Hi, it’s me. I don’t know what to say. I can’t remember whether I told you why I helped your daughter conceal the evidence. I might have told you I helped her out of compassion. You asked me to look out for her, remember? But the truth is she blackmailed me. Anyway… If only we’d met under different circumstances, huh? I’m kind of confused at the moment and I’ve known you such a little amount of time but… I guess what I’m trying to say is… You got under my skin, in spite of everything.’ He cleared his throat, then continued: ‘The last time I saw you, things… If you’d like to meet, to talk, even if it’s just to say goodbye, I’ll be at a pub called The Old Ale Emporium tonight. I’m meeting an old friend, but… maybe we could talk after. If you want.’
He exhaled, aware he was rambling. Glancing at the melted firearm at his side, his purpose was suddenly clear. ‘You asked me that time if I was for real, remember? Well, I was. I was. Goodbye, Sarah.’
He hung up, then fetched a small screwdriver.
It wasn’t easy disassembling the weapon. The kiln had chewed it up well and the magazine was only removed from the butt after jacking this way and that. After the magazine fell out, Patrick clawed at what might have once been clasps on the top of the gun and succeeded in sliding the top back to peer inside the chamber. There was a single bullet within. After prising amid congealed metal, something that might have been the barrel came loose, followed by a large spring, a spoke of steel the length of a matchstick and what Patrick assumed to be the firing pin. He took the screwdriver to the handle and eventually succeeded in separating the two halves, then over the course of his afternoon hacksawed the remains until nothing remotely resembled the external casing of a handgun.