Kindergarten

by Peter Rushforth

  “Don’t ask me what your father’s job is, will you?” Lilli asked eventually, when the questions started to become more and more bizarre.

  He had been reminding Lilli of some of his early lessons with her, when he had completed his hour by firing twenty questions, trying to get her to answer automatically without the agonies of thought, insisting on complete sentences. He used to hold on gently to her hands, not allowing her to move them, so that she could make no gesture, no movement to convey words she could not utter or recall. She had been unable to think of the word for “headmaster,” and although he had included the same question over and over again, she could summon up no other word for Dad’s job than “big teacher” for several weeks.

  “You were a very hard teacher,” Lilli said, smiling

  “Inevitably, with such a troublesome pupil.” Corrie assumed his most schoolmasterly voice. “I had to complain to the big teacher.”

  He remembered how, in his early lessons, he was selfconscious, not fully at ease, and sometimes found it difficult to talk beyond the words he had prepared for the lessons with her. He used an awkward jocularity, copied from some of his teachers, who were unsure of how to communicate with him. Now he was the teacher, and all his experience up to that time had been of being taught.

  They sat together in silence again.

  He remembered how the skin of Lilli’s hands felt loose, as if flesh and bone beneath were too small for it, like something soft and yielding to lie against if you were tired.

  “You look very thoughtful,” Lilli said, some time later.

  It was the usual invitation to talk.

  “Not really.”

  “Yes, really. You’ve been the same all week, Corrie. Worried about the onset of old age?”

  “It’s just some music I’m trying to…”

  “Yes. You have been practising a lot recently.”

  There was a faintly interrogative note in Lilli’s comment.

  He couldn’t tell Lilli what his main thoughts were about, that inner room in the bedroom, that entry into the forest, pathless, grassless, black as perpetual night within a few feet of the edge.

  “Jo’s very unhappy at the moment, Corrie. I think he’s been lonely, and wanting to talk to you. He says you’ve been locking yourself in the Ferry House, and staying there all day.” Lilli paused. “And he hasn’t heard any music from inside.”

  “I’ve been thinking.”

  “He was crying last night. It’s the end of the year. The time when you look back.”

  “Mum?”

  “Yes.”

  “He was very quiet when Sal was here.”

  Corrie thought for a moment.

  “You’re right about the end of the year. I don’t feel that time has passed just because I’ve had my birthday today, but on New Year’s Eve I’ll be thinking of a whole year that’s gone.”

  “He’s missing her very badly just now. Christmas, and your father being away.”

  “Jo put his present in the middle of his room, so it’ll be the first thing he sees when he gets back.”

  They had bought Dad a piece of Staffordshire pottery when Sal had taken them into Norwich, a ship called The Three Brothers.

  “He’s been upset about that school, and the terrorists as well.”

  That afternoon, the terrorists had set a deadline. They were going to shoot one child every half-hour, beginning at ten-fifteen, English time, that evening, and continue until they got what they wanted. Lilli had listened to the radio with the two of them to the serious, impassioned voices speaking in German, and then the reporter in Berlin translating what was being said, the telephone line crackling, breathing and heartbeats magnified by the recording. The news-reader’s calm, steady voice mentioned that there was some movement of army units in the area around the school, and then went on to other items of news: the murder of a kidnap victim in Turin, an explosion in a Paris shopping-centre, the trial of an Arab gunman in London. Corrie thought of the young woman reading the evening news on the television, carefully made-up, cool, distant, like the voice of a teacher in a lecture theatre—a remote figure—speaking unemotionally of the events of an equally remote past.

  “It’s a quarter to ten. Let’s have supper soon.”

  “I’ll go and get Jo.”

  “Will you talk to him, Corrie? Brothers should help each other.”

  He nodded.

  THERE seemed to be no one in Tennyson’s when he walked through. Baskerville stood up as he went into their part of the sun lounge, to investigate who was there, peering closely at him before he went back to his basket, wagging his tail and looking vaguely gratified after Corrie scratched his head for him.

  As he drew the curtains, he looked out across the Green. The lights around the horse-chestnut tree were switched on, swaying in the wind. Two boys were riding bicycles round the tree, their backs to their handlebars, facing out across the saddles, moving their feet round and round backwards, skidding on the wet grass.

  He picked up a book lying on the back of the chesterfield and began to look at the illustrations. He could hear music from Jo’s bedroom upstairs. Pooh and Piglet walked through the snow together. Pooh and Tigger sat at a table eating honey. Piglet planted a haycorn. Eeyore, with immense dignity, floated out from under the bridge during the game of Poohsticks. Jo had once written an essay in which he had called Eeyore his favourite character in fiction.

  He looked at the picture of Piglet’s ears streaming behind him like banners, and then walked out into the hall to call upstairs.

  “Jo?”

  He started up the stairs in the darkness.

  “Jo?”

  The words from the Saint Matthew Passion filled the staircase, the whole of the quiet house. The voice soared.

  “Erbarme dich, mein Gott,

  Um meiner Zähren willen;

  Schaue hier, Herz und Auge

  Weint vor dir bitterlich.

  Erbarme dich!”

  It was an aria which always filled him with emotion and made him feel close to tears, like the moment in Le Grand Meaulnes when Meaulnes clutched his baby daughter in his arms, sobbing at the death of his young wife, or the moment in Romeo and Juliet when Juliet kissed the dead Romeo and cried, “Thy lips are warm.” He was tenderhearted, easily moved. He had fought to control his tears when the Film Society had shown those two films, been unable to speak afterwards, moved by the death of children.

  There was no one in Jo’s bedroom.

  His boots and his socks were lying beside the bed, and the T-shirt he had been wearing that day: “My parents went to Bermuda, and all they brought back for me was this lousy T-shirt.”

  He looked at the Advent calendar from one of Jo’s old ladies.

  It was a picture of a city in the east. Kings with gifts were riding towards it. Flat-topped roofs and battlemented towers rose into the night sky. A bright star was shining, a light to illuminate the whole of the city and its crowded streets, long ago. Tree-covered hills rose to the distant dark mass of mountains, beyond a lake whose deserted shore was lined with fishing-boats. Every morning from the first of December, Matthias had come into Jo’s room very early to open one of the twenty-four little doors in the city, to reveal the secret scene inside, to wake Jo and tell him what that day’s scene was. The calendar hung in front of the light on the wall, so that Jo could see it as he lay in bed, and so that the light would glow through the scenes behind the little doors, all of them now open, revealing angels rejoicing, birds in the sky, fish in the lake, families sitting at meals together, musical instruments, cattle and donkeys in the stable. On the morning of Christmas Eve, Matthias had opened the last little door, the most elaborate and beautiful of all the pictures. In the warm candlelit interior, the young mother gazed lovingly at the baby who was born to die.

  It was a German Advent calendar, printed in Munich.

  Erbarme dich, mein Gott,

  Um meiner Zähren willen

  On the eighteenth of December, Ma
tthias woke Jo to tell him the morning’s picture was of a radiator. Baffled, Jo had got out of bed to investigate, and found an illustration of a harp.

  He saw wet footprints on the carpet, leading away from the record-player, and followed them through into the bathroom, putting on the light in the corridor.

  Jo was sitting in the bath.

  Corrie sat on the lid of the lavatory pedestal, and leaned back, stretching his legs out.

  “I shall avert my eyes if my presence is inhibiting your performance,” Jo said. He had a very crisp, clear voice. He was frequently told he spoke “very good English.”

  The room was in darkness, and Jo’s skin looked very white, gleaming faintly in the light that shone through the open door from the corridor.

  As Corrie watched, Jo closed his eyes, held his head very upright, and shook it rapidly from side to side, a gesture he often made so that his hair would fall neatly into place.

  He moved across and sat on the edge of the bath.

  Jo was not having a bath. His chest was bare, but he was dressed in the jeans that Sal had bought him for Christmas, and sitting in the half-filled bath to shrink them to size. He was peering closely at a book. A carton of yoghurt stood in the soap-rack. The water was already a deep shade of blue.

  “How long have you been in there?”

  “An hour or so.” He spoke very quietly, his voice expressionless.

  He put the book on the soap-rack, picked up the yoghurt, made little finicky movements with the spoon. One of Matthias’s rubber ducks was floating in the water beside him.

  “I think it’s about time you got out, then. That water’s cold, Jo.”

  His white skin was very cold, and rough with goosepimples.

  Corrie began to speak with the dead-pan elocution of a lesson in a foreign language, pointing as he spoke.

  “The water. The Johann. The chest. The asthma.”

  “The cough. The guts. The floor,” Jo said. “I’ll be all right.”

  He was very sensible about his asthma usually, and knew when to ask for his tablets, and when to go to bed.

  Jo looked at him. “Any more news about that school?”

  “No. Nothing new.”

  “What do you think will happen?” He looked intently at Corrie.

  “The troops will go in, like they did with that plane. There’s nothing else that can happen, is there?”

  “They said they’ll kill those children.”

  “No one was hurt in the plane.”

  The terrorists had made no concessions at all. They had severely injured a teacher and a child when they first attacked the school, and had refused to allow any medical assistance. The two bled to death, and their bodies had been thrown from the windows. They were still there, at the front of the building—no one allowed to approach near enough to remove them—together with the body of the first person who had died, a teacher who was helping children out of a first-floor window when the attack had started. Her body lay on the snow-covered grass, where she had fallen from the window when she was shot, a middle-aged woman in a neat grey suit, her spectacles lying on the path to one side of her. They had stared at the picture on the television when the news of the attack on the school was first broken, like people in a passing car looking at an accident in which they were not involved.

  There were five terrorists in the school, three men and two women. They wanted eleven members of the Movement Eighteenth October freed from prisons in West Germany, each to be given DM120,000 and flown to a country of his or her choice.

  Corrie could feel the edge of the bath through his jeans.

  “That water is cold, Jo.”

  He stood up and held out his hands. Jo gave him the empty yoghurt carton and the book.

  “Thank you, my good man.”

  “Out of the bath, Grandad, before you shrink away completely. There’s not much left now.”

  “What time is it, infant?”

  Jo’s wrist was bare.

  Corrie looked at his watch.

  “The big hand’s on nine, and the little hand’s nearly on ten. Lilli’s offering supper.”

  Jo stood up and pulled the plug out. He crossed his arms over his chest, shivering.

  “O.K.?”

  Jo nodded.

  “I want to see the news on T.V.”

  The chain Jo was wearing round his neck had been sent to him by one of his old ladies. Over three years ago, when Mum had been heavily pregnant with Matthias, they had all appeared on television in a national family quiz programme. They lasted for several weeks, and got as far as the quarter-finals, losing on the last question, when Dad said that “All the world’s a stage” was a speech from Twelfth Night. (He had wailed immediately he had said it, but the answer stood.) They all ostracised him for a week until he begged for mercy, and came down to breakfast one morning dressed in a sack, with some burnt twigs balanced on his head because he couldn’t find any ashes. Jo had received fan mail from half the old ladies in England after these appearances, and answered them all. He still received Christmas and birthday cards from them.

  “What’s wrong, Jo?”

  Jo began to take his jeans off.

  “Nothing.”

  He could feel Jo’s pain inside himself. He remembered when he had been very small—it might even have been before Jo was born—when he was covered with stings after blundering into a wasps’ nest on the common. He could remember being beside himself with pain and panic, a pain too large and overwhelming for his body to be able to cope with, so that he curled up on the floor, whimpering, “Make it go away, make it go away,” over and over again, hands half-raised as if to push the world away, his body rolling from side to side, and Mum had been there to make the pain go away.

  “I’m the one who’s known to be moody, aren’t I?”

  “He never says a word,’” Jo quoted. He had overheard two girls discussing Corrie in the High Street.

  Corrie had never seen anyone with such thin legs as his brother. Dad called him Knitting-Needle Legs. Jo kept beating him up, but he wouldn’t stop it. Jo, seeing Corrie looking at him, struck a few he-man poses, flexing his biceps, his face quite expressionless.

  “Are you thinking about those terrorists?”

  “No. Well, not really.”

  “Are you thinking about Mum again?”

  Jo arranged his jeans very carefully on the rail that overhung the bath, aligning the edges precisely, his back to his brother. He concentrated on adjusting the jeans exactly as he wanted them. It was a while before he answered.

  “A bit,” he said eventually, his voice indistinct.

  They were Levi jeans. Corrie looked at them, rather than Jo’s thin bent back. He felt envious of Cato, who would always have little orange tags bearing his name sewn into the seams of the clothes he wore.

  “Corrie?”

  He couldn’t see Jo’s face properly, bent over in the dim light in the corner.

  “Mmm?”

  “Do you think that Matty remembers Mum? Do you think he still misses her?”

  Corrie sat back on the lid of the lavatory pedestal.

  “He cried a lot when she first left for Rome…He cried a lot at first.” Corrie paused, trying to sort his ideas out clearly. “I think, to Matty, she just went away on a journey one day, and didn’t come back.”

  “But she promised him she’d come back. Does he think she’s a liar? Does he think she’s just left him? Remember how he kept asking when she was coming back?”

  Jo turned.

  “Do you still miss Mum?” he asked, looking directly at Corrie.

  “Yes, of course I do.”

  “I thought it was just me.”

  Jo had been the one who had cried. Corrie remembered sitting beside him, with his arm around his shoulders for comfort, very pale in a new suit that was too big.

  Jo pulled the towel around his shoulders, and they walked through into Jo’s bedroom.

  The record had come to an end, and Jo switched the reco
rd-player off. He awkwardly hitched at the towel, trying to stop it from falling off, as he slid the record back into its cover and then placed it in the box.

  “When Mum had that operation, she would have known if it was very serious, wouldn’t she?” He concentrated hard on his speech when he spoke seriously, like someone learning to read, straining over a few short words in a small child’s picture-book.

  “It was serious,” Corrie answered, and then told Jo something he had never told him before. “The day before she went into hospital, I heard her crying in the bedroom. I’d come home early. She’d closed the door, but I heard her.”

  “Did you go in to her?”

  “No. I didn’t know what to do.”

  He had been twelve, Jo eight.

  “She talked to me, the morning before she went.” Jo was sitting on his bed, beside Corrie, drying between his toes. “She was listening to the Saint Matthew Passion when I came in. I was upset because she was going, and she said to me”—he concentrated carefully—“‘If you want me to be there with you, play this music, and I will be there. If you want to think of me, think of me when you hear this music.’” He smiled as he looked up at Corrie. “That’s how the records got so scratched. I used to put one of them on, and sit here with my eyes closed when no one else was there.”

  “She told me to look after you when she wasn’t there.”

  Jo stood up and walked across to the map of Rousseau.

  “In the dark and pathless forest.”

  “In the cold, sharp, shifting scree.”

  “In the moonless, starless silence.”

  “The Journey to the Inmost Sea.”

  “Tell me about Rousseau, Corrie.”

  “Rousseau is an island, and only we, amongst the non-Rousseaunians, know about it. Far away from the rest of the world, inaccessible, and impossible to find…”

  Jo dressed slowly, listening as Corrie spoke, changing into fresh clothes. His T-shirt was an old and faded one, with a large smiling face on the front, like the one he drew inside the letter “o” of his name: the two dots, and the curve for the smile.

  When he was dressed, and Corrie had finished speaking, Jo sat down again on the bed beside his brother, leaning in against him.