Black Chalk

by Albert Alla

  Beth had never been a close friend. Our groups, originally separate, had merged after the summer of 1999. More from a lack of opportunity than of affinity, we’d never spent much time together. I knew her best from what Jeffrey had told me. For the three months leading to the shooting, it seemed like every time we had a quiet minute, he told me another story about Beth. Once, a few weeks before Anna and I broke up, I told Anna what was happening between them, and she took it upon herself to organise a double date.

  ‘You invite Jeffrey, I’ll take care of Beth,’ she said.

  She chose The Sixth Sense because it was meant to be scary.

  ‘Dead people. She’ll jump into his arms,’ she smiled in anticipation.

  But Beth went to the bathroom while we chose our seats, and by the time I saw her, she’d come down the wrong aisle. She sat next to Anna, as far away from Jeffrey as she could be. Thankfully, the movie was good enough that we had something to talk about afterwards. When we left the cinema, I tried to pull Anna to my side, but we had to squeeze through a crowd, and Beth ended up alongside Anna. Jeffrey shrugged at me, and I shrugged back. Still, Anna wasn’t going to give up: she took us to the canal and pulled out a half-full bottle of vodka. Three shots later, I was kissing Anna, and Jeffrey was leaning close to Beth.

  ‘It’s going to happen,’ Anna whispered in my ear. I looked at my friend and I thought the same.

  The next day, Jeffrey and I were lounging in my room.

  ‘No, mate,’ he said, ‘nothing. She left five minutes after you.’

  ‘My guess is that she’s a lesbian,’ I said.

  He chuckled louder than me. I made many other guesses – she’s scared of you, she thinks you don’t like her (Anna’s theory), she doesn’t fancy you – but whatever I said, he always brought it back to the same thought: ‘No, it’s more complicated than that. It’s just…’ he started and then, trying to work out what to say next, he trailed off, and then he smiled for he liked the way she made him suffer. He liked it even more when he felt that they were moving in the right direction – then he boasted about cricket, football, rugby, girls, about everything and anything that I could mention.

  I was all smiles as Beth stood by my bed and explained her absence.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I echoed, as she told me of her older sister needing the car, of buses not coming back late enough, of the flat tyre on her bike. The apologies only stopped when my mother came back with our teas.

  Beth fell silent. My mother left and we were alone and Beth stayed silent. Her stillness was contagious. It was louder than her apologies. It was tightening my smile, and I needed to smile. I had to go for its source.

  ‘How is everyone doing?’ I asked.

  She looked startled, and, for a moment, I thought I was going to get back to Jeffrey’s ebullient Beth. But then she smiled a sweet smile, an old smile.

  ‘Everyone’s fine,’ she said.

  ‘Fine?’ The word came out as a challenge, surprising me as much as her.

  She flinched and her smile disappeared. I found myself liking her face better without it, as if the smile I’d yearned for a few seconds earlier had suddenly acquired a meaning I couldn’t bear.

  ‘You can imagine how it is,’ she said, yellowed merriness settling over her face once again. ‘Everyone was shocked. Completely shocked. But we’ve got to move on.’ She sized up the horror on my face, and added: ‘Of course, it’s not the same for everyone. I don’t think that!’

  I gulped.

  ‘Are people moving on already?’ I asked.

  ‘No, I don’t mean it like that. I just meant that when it happened, no one knew what to do. And now people are a bit more normal.’ I stared into my cup. ‘It was John’s eighteenth on the 15th and he’d put together a big party. Well, he cancelled it of course. But he still wanted to do something, so we had a few drinks the other night, and it was nice to get together like we used to do. You’ll have to come and hang out with us when you get out.’

  I forced a smile. ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘It seems like everyone is moving on as you say. I’m not sure I can… just yet.’ She cleared her forehead of the curls bouncing their way down to her eyebrows, and I noticed how solemn she had become. ‘You said something about a service. I haven’t heard anything about that. What was it?’

  She sighed. ‘It was a funeral.’

  ‘Have there been many… services?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Have you been to all of them?’

  She looked up and studied my face for a few seconds.

  ‘No, I haven’t. There were too many.’

  ‘Who was it this morning?’

  ‘Jeffrey.’ And as she said that, I realised there was no more colour in her cheeks. She was tugging hard at one of her curls, swirling what was left of her tea with the other hand. ‘Look,’ she said, a quiver in her voice, ‘let’s talk about something else. What’s it like being in hospital?’

  As the conversation moved to safer grounds, I found myself looking around my room, wanting to shatter a lamp, snap the IV stand, throw a chair through the window. But I lay quietly and talked small stuff.

  ***

  ‘There he is.’

  The deep voice broke through my reverie. A tall man followed my mother in, his entrance dispelling all of my thoughts. Despite the size of the man, his movements seemed contained and measured.

  ‘You must be Nate. I’m George Hume.’

  I took his extended hand, and let the warm flesh engulf mine. He was the first person to shake my hand properly for a long time. The ritual, a relic of my past, put me at ease.

  ‘Your mother was kind enough to invite me in, Nate. When she told me that no one had been to visit you, I had to come and see how you were. So tell me, how are you?’

  ‘Mister…’ I paused, looking at his pin-striped suit, at the gold wristwatch and the engraved cufflinks.

  ‘Oh, I apologise, I forget how young you are… Hornsbury is part of my constituency, Nate. Now, when you turn eighteen, you will try to remember that, won’t you?’ he said with a sly smile. I almost laughed at his joke. ‘Call me George, Nate. You’ve done so much you could call the Prime Minister Tony.’

  This time I laughed, although I felt a little confused.

  ‘How long must we wait until you’re well enough to get back on your feet?’

  ‘I can walk already, Mister… George. The doctors say I should be heading home by the end of the week.’

  ‘That’s good news,’ he said, joining his hands up by his chin as if in prayer. ‘Can I ask you something, Nate?’

  I nodded instantly. His hands ran down his lapels before they met behind his back.

  ‘There are many rumours going around, but one in particular has caught my attention. I feel hesitant to bring it up, but is it true that you shot Eric Knight?’

  My eyes jolted towards my mother.

  ‘I’ve heard,’ the politician continued, ‘that you bravely disarmed him, and that you shot him when you had to, when he was going to make his way to the other room in the annexe—’

  ‘No,’ I interrupted him. That first word had come out forcefully, but I didn’t know what else to add. He gave me the chance to say more before he spoke on.

  ‘You’re reluctant to speak, and I can understand that. I was in the army for thirty years myself, and there were times when I was lauded for things I hated. That’s normal, do you understand?’

  When I didn’t respond, he looked at my mother.

  ‘I shot him but it wasn’t like that,’ I said.

  He became very serious as he answered me, speaking as though his every word mattered:

  ‘Nate, you’re clearly an intelligent young man, and you have a bright future ahead. But listen to me, sometimes you do what you must, and you’re left with a hollow feeling down your stomach. It won’t do you any good. Steer well clear of that feeling!’

  ***

  My last two days in hospital were spent largely alone. My mother came in twice on my
penultimate afternoon, setting her things down as if she were going to stay, but then letting a message, an idea, whisk her away before her weight had had time to mould the foam of her chair. I barely looked up as she left the room.

  By myself, I thought about Eric, despite all I had told the inspector. Particularly, I pondered over Eric’s last month, thinking of the changes he must have gone through, and the symptoms I could have detected. There were incidents that happened at school. Raising his voice outside an exam hall, when he knew there were students inside taking their tests. And the moment Harry had so willingly recounted.

  But my mind turned to the time we’d spent outside school. So much could happen at school that there could be a hundred explanations for every flicker or outburst. Ever analytical, Eric would have told me that such data points were noisy signals.

  The times I’d seen him alone outside school were cleaner. There was the time his mother made us orange juice, and the uneasy silence that had pervaded the visit. The silence hadn’t shocked me then. After all, we were teenagers, sweet one day and vile the next.

  But now that I think of my subsequent visit, I can’t help but think that his mood changed too much and too quickly. It was the following day. I had brought him another bat, an older piece which no one had used for years, but which was also made of Grade II English willow. The chunk he’d glued the previous day hadn’t held because it was too coarse. I’d been the one to suggest using another bat, and I’d felt proud when he agreed.

  When he finished clenching the newly-glued chunk to my bat, we put on our coats and headed down to the copse. He spoke as we walked, his voice calm and measured.

  ‘You like them, but you’re too easy on them. The system isn’t efficient. A bunch of idiots dictate terms to everyone else, and because we’re fragmented, we can’t fight back. Tell me how that makes any sense.’

  He picked up a bunch of pebbles and, one by one, he aimed them at an empty nest high up a bare branch. It was a harmless gesture, a liberating gesture, but how easy it is to see it as some sort of omen. I too joined in: I bent down to gather ammunition, and fired it at the still nest.

  ***

  Each memory came innocent and left tainted. And once tainted, memories grew persistent. Their stench remained and coloured other thoughts, so that, like an infection, I was soon left with nothing but tainted memories. Even fields of heather and gorse hugging the Cornish coastline took an ominous turn. I started thinking of the shadows in the recesses between cliff faces, of the waves crashing into rocks at the bottom of the drop, of the birds plunging down to the dark sea for their prey.

  With memories came dread, spreading and thickening but never rising to the surface. It skirted the politician’s cufflinks, bounced off the police’s tape recorder, and amassed at the inspector’s eyebrows. I even grew afraid of the old black man who brought me my dinner on weekdays.

  I don’t want to exaggerate. The dread never had me shivering in a corner, but it settled snugly into the background. For weeks, I woke up with a mass the size of an olive stone pulsating in my stomach. It was in the shower that I remembered where it came from, and it was in the shower that, months later, I realised it was gone.

  ***

  My pencil point balanced on the half-empty page, I smelled the flowers before I saw them. Their fragrance drifted over the sterile floor and opened my eyes like one throws off a heavy blanket. Two nurses had entered my room, each carrying a bouquet in hand. The small dark-haired one was my current day nurse, while the red-haired nurse with a Polish accent had been in charge of my bed in my old ward.

  ‘We heard you were leaving today,’ said the dark-haired one, half a step closer than her companion, ‘so we all thought we should get you something.’

  I had always interpreted her pale irresponsive features as a sign of distance. But I was now seeing them shaped into a genuine smile.

  ‘Flowers for a young boy…’ said the redhead. The way she tilted them, the words jarred less. ‘Maybe you can give them to your mother?’

  ‘Yes, she likes flowers…’ I said before realising I was being rude. ‘They look very nice! But… do you give them to everyone?’

  ‘No-no-no,’ said the dark-haired nurse. ‘Can you imagine?’ she laughed towards the red-haired nurse. ‘Thank God!’

  She reached behind her for the red-haired nurse’s bouquet and laid both on a table by the window while she addressed me: ‘We’re not meant to talk to you about what happened. But now that that MP has gone and told everyone, we felt it’d be alright to come and thank you. What you did, it was very brave.’ She mouthed a silent ‘thank you’.

  She started to fidget and her features tightened into a more familiar expression.

  ‘Okay, we’ve got to get back to work. Is there anything you need?’

  When I shook my head, she made her way towards the door with her colleague.

  ‘Put them in water when you get home,’ the red-haired nurse said as she shut the door.

  They were probably too far down the corridor to hear my words of thanks. My diary includes both a written description and a drawing of this scene. I’ve stayed faithful to the description here. The drawing fills the rest of the page my pencil had rested on. The flowers in the foreground come through well enough, but the nurses’ faces are flat. Just after they left, despite their kindness, despite the weeks they’d spent taking care of me, I could only recall two or three details and had to make up the rest.

  ***

  I left my ward on one of those glorious crisp afternoons that make you forget winter’s gloom and wish for spring to hold off a little longer. I was getting half the experience from my window: the sun was shining to all and sundry, and the few clouds running through the sky never seemed to obstruct its rays. I wanted to be part of it, to feel the winter wind on my skin, and a tingle of blood rising up my cheeks. I wanted to spin around and smile at the beauty of the world.

  My mother was leading me out through a labyrinth of doors, elevators and corridors, carrying a bag with all of my things in one hand, and both bouquets in the other, when we passed an empty room with a television turned on to a 24-hour news channel. Had I walked on, I would have only caught a couple of isolated images. But the newsreader’s steady cadence broke through, and my feet turned into the room of their own accord.

  ‘And a reminder of today’s top news. Police investigating the Hornsbury School Shooting have released the shooter’s diary’ – The screen showed a piece of paper, a cursor highlighting the words a voice was reading.

  ‘Nothing will be the same when I’m done with them.’

  The cursor skipped down the page, and the voice read out another section:

  ‘People will wonder why. They’ll wonder for eternity. The ones who don’t get it are as guilty as the ones who will die today.’

  From the corner of my eyes, I could see my mother’s hand reaching for my arm. The prospect made me shiver. She didn’t understand. I shoved her back.

  ‘Fuck off!’

  Anger was shaking its way through my limbs, frothing at my lips, gathering around my eyes. And then it was gone. With a glare at my mother, I sat on a chair and hid my head between my arms. On the chair’s soft cushion, my spine buckled and my legs hung limp. The feeling spread. I was worth nothing.

  I started crying, at first hiding the tears, but the sobs gathered, as if they’d been held back for weeks, and finally sensing an opening, they were all rushing forth together. On the one side of my mind, I heard Eric ranting, passion and hate coursing through his veins, holding him upright, warm and alive. On the other, there was nothing: a void, an absurd ending. I felt as though I belonged to that void; my life was an anomaly; there was no sense to my tears. But that didn’t console me – on the contrary, it made me sadder.

  My shoulders shook up and down; spit was dripping down my chin; I could hardly breathe. Gasping for breath, I wailed through my tears. The noise bounced off the wall and came back to my ears. It was too much: needing to contr
ol myself, I forced deep breaths into my chest. The sadness mellowed every time I exhaled, and the tears dried.

  As I write this, I realise those were the first tears I shed since Eric had burst into the classroom. For weeks I’d managed to restrain my memories and wall my shock in. I’m still convinced it was the right way to go. The politician was correct: sometimes it’s better to steer clear of a feeling. Had I spent days on end wallowing in my own tragedy, I would have come out depressed. My way just meant the occasional outburst.

  When I felt calm enough, I looked at my mother through my fingers. She was sitting down with her bent head softly bobbing up and down, her hair hiding her face, the bouquets across her lap, the bag by her feet. I stood up and laid a hand on her shoulder.

  As I came out of the hospital, a photographer took a picture of me. It is a sympathetic portrait: I’m walking with my shoulders slumped and my eyes puffed, the skin under my eyes illuminated by a trail of tears. I’m wearing a jacket which seems too big for my reduced frame, and I’m holding a bouquet of flowers tight against my chest. My mother stands behind me, car keys dangling from her fingers.

  This picture still comes first when I do an image search of ‘Nate Dillingham’.

  Several years later, well after I thought my scars healed, I sought the rest of Eric’s note online. I came across a report on the massacre. It described the notebook police found: its cover lined with dust, a thin powder settled in between every page. They found it neatly stacked on top of papers Eric kept by his workbench. The note follows countless pages of long divisions, object sketches, and measurements. I read it three times; then I closed my browser and never looked at it again. All these years later, I still remember it in its entirety.

  We’ve had enough. It’s time for the underground to come to the surface. Once again, it’s my turn to start everything. The plan is simple and direct, it won’t fail. Finally people will see my work.