Black Chalk

by Albert Alla

  ‘Hello, my name is Chloe. You must be Nate, and you must be Liz. I’ll be taking care of you today.’ Before she had time to finish, she walked to the reception desk, and scribbled on a piece of paper. Coming back to us, she asked: ‘Is this your first time on TV?’

  The question reminded me that I ought to be nervous, and my shoulders knotted up.

  ‘Well, yes,’ I said. Her voice grew even more excited.

  ‘You’ll love it!’ she said. ‘Come with me, we’ll get you ready!’

  We followed her through a maze of corridors.

  ‘Chloe!’ I called.

  She turned, surprised to see me ten paces behind.

  ‘I can’t walk fast.’ I waved at my stomach, a general expression of pain on my face.

  ‘Oh, of course!’ she said, and proceeded to walk only five steps ahead.

  She zigzagged down grey corridors with PVC floors, her toes squeaking with every step, until we reached the right door. We walked into a wide vestibule, five red raincoats ranged against the wall to my left, and three large framed pictures of beautiful people laughing to my right. Chloe ushered us into a room directly opposite the entrance – she called it the green room, even though there was nothing green about it. Inside, strangers talked and laughed.

  ‘Only minutes away, Nate! We’ll call you when we’re ready. Ask me if you need anything,’ said Chloe before she hurried away into another room. My mother took a second to take in her surroundings, and, with a nod, she told me to wait while she went and talked to the hosts.

  Feeling shy, I made my way towards a tray of neatly cut sandwiches artistically arranged around a pot of tzatziki and celery sticks. Trying not to upset the symmetry, I picked out four sandwiches, one from each corner of the plate, and scanned the room. A bald man with a double chin was sitting on the room’s only sofa prattling to a white-haired man with a puffy nose. Something about their energy scared me towards the other side of the room. I chose a design chair, which managed to hold me despite the curvy holes in its wooden panels. Nibbling on my sandwiches, my eyes looking at everything but the people in the room, I eavesdropped on their conversations until my mother came back.

  ‘I had a chat to them. They know how you feel. They want to do a practice run now,’ she said. ‘Don’t forget to sit straight and articulate.’

  The others gave me a sympathetic look as Chloe led us out. In the studio proper, my curiosity was first drawn to a messy wall of cameras and cables, looking clunky and dated, before I turned to what they faced: a red armchair, a Moroccan coffee table, and a lush two-seater. These images felt familiar: I’d watched the show once at Jeffrey’s house, and the strongest memory I had of it was of a blue armchair. They’d changed the furniture, but they’d kept the cosy feel. The Thames shone through a long window behind the sofa set. For a second, I thought the window was a fake, but then I noticed that the wind was whipping water off the river’s surface, and that three passers-by in thick coats were walking between the river and the studio. A fake would have looked more appealing.

  Chris and Mary were sharing the sofa, leaning towards each other before they noticed me and smiled. He stood up and met me outside the furniture circle, while his wife smiled encouragingly.

  ‘Hello, Nate. How are you?’

  ‘Fine, thank you.’

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Dillingham. You can stand there if you want.’ He pointed at a spot behind the cameras. ‘Sit down, Nate. Sit with us.’

  He lounged back, threw a floppy arm over the seat’s backrest, while his leg propped itself against the coffee table, and smiled at me as if we were old friends.

  ‘We’re going to run through the sort of questions we’ll ask you on air. Are you excited?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  He nodded assuredly.

  ‘We always start with a few friendly words to introduce our guests to our viewers. Let me try something for you,’ he said and turned towards the unmanned camera. ‘The Hornsbury School Shooting threw a chill over the nation, but as we struggle to understand what happened on the 10th of February,’ he stumbled and immediately donned a thoughtful expression. Then, without anything changing that I could notice, he ran his hand through his hair, and started again as though he hadn’t stopped. ‘As we struggle to understand what happened, and we’ve had a few memorable guests here to talk about it, at least we can say that one glimmer of hope came out of the events. And that’s the actions of Nate Dillingham, the only pupil who survived the actual shooting. Nate, we’re very grateful that you could come and talk to us so soon after coming out of hospital.’ He paused and looked at me. ‘I’ll say something like that on air. Is that alright with you?’

  A vague unease started to take hold of me. Feeling he wasn’t expecting an answer, I shrugged.

  ‘Alright, let’s ask you a few questions. You’ve spent weeks recovering. How was that?’

  The question threw me: I hadn’t given much thought to my time in hospital by then. The oddness of the weeks I’d spent sequestered, and the impact they had on me, struck me much later.

  ‘It was… kind of boring.’ They laughed at that. ‘I spent all day in bed, I drank a lot of tea.’ Again they laughed. They were affable hosts. ‘I had to do a bit of rehab work, but not much.’

  ‘Are you still in pain?’ he asked.

  ‘A little, but not anything like before.’

  ‘Thinking of the whole tragedy, I find it difficult to imagine that you’re barely seventeen. But of course, that’s precisely how old you are. Before this happened, I suppose you were preparing for your A-levels.’

  His unctuous voice had me wanting to agree with everything he said.

  ‘Yes, exactly. We were all doing it. Just getting ready for our exams. Actually, I was thinking more about the cricket season than my exams.’

  They laughed. Mary spoke for the first time.

  ‘We had George Hume here last Monday telling us a bit more about what happened. Could you tell us a bit about that?’

  ‘Well…’ I trailed off, trying to get my thoughts around the question. They were nodding me on. ‘I guess what he said…’

  She leaned towards me:

  ‘Your story is simply extraordinary. As the shooting was taking place, you stood up and walked to Eric Knight, and you managed to disarm him.’

  ‘No, it wasn’t like that,’ I said before I had time to think. The uneasy laughter that had quietened was now gripping me tightly. A surge of memories was building inside me, and my mind was going blank in anticipation.

  ‘But you managed to wrestle a gun from him,’ said Chris in his easy tones, ‘and then, and this must be very hard to think about, you had to shoot him so he wouldn’t go and hurt more people. We were talking about this last night, weren’t we?’ he said to his wife. ‘In the end, we had to admit that we probably didn’t have the courage to do what you did. It’s not often we can say this, but it truly was an act of heroism. What was going through your mind then?’

  I stared at them, past her lacquered curls and his perfect parting, past my mother’s lengthening face, at a camera aimed at my toes, at the black curtains hanging behind it. And the memories came: Anna panting, her lungs rattling every time she gasped for air; Jeffrey on the floor next to me grunting; and Eric’s brief shock when I fired first, before pain wiped off his last emotion. There was no heroism in those memories. Nothing but horror.

  ‘I…’ I struggled to bring my voice under control. ‘Nothing, I didn’t have time to think. It just happened. I don’t know how to explain it.’

  ‘Anna Walker was your girlfriend, wasn’t she?’ asked Mary.

  ‘Ex-girlfriend.’

  ‘It was so sad. For some days, all of us here hoped she would make it, didn’t we? But as she died, she had words for you, didn’t she?’

  I stared at her in silence, my eyes bulging out of my skull, my thoughts flaying my so-called heroism.

  ‘She thanked you for trying, didn’t she?’

  There were no traces of a smile le
ft on my lips. Chris broke in:

  ‘This is all terribly hard for you, Nate. For weeks we’ve all been glued to our TV screens wanting to learn more, but this is far bigger than news. You’ve just been through hell. But you have a family, and they’re all in it with you. You have a brother, don’t you?’

  At the end of the mock run, they leaned towards each other and whispered animatedly. My mother joined them. Feeling like I was intruding, I rose and moved towards the green room, hoping to see Chloe or the prattling man, but not daring to leave the studio until they’d told me I could. I saw myself in a mirror hidden in a nook – a toad, a cockroach, a bastard, a man who shouldn’t have survived, who didn’t deserve to be standing in this studio. A hero, I scoffed.

  A man and a woman had joined Chris and Mary, and now I could hear parts of their conversation. It was about me. After a few minutes, the woman got up, and noticing me for the first time, came to me:

  ‘We’d still like to do the interview live. But we’d like to practise a few more questions. Is that alright with you?’

  Wanting it to be alright, I agreed. We were on air fifteen minutes later. I was emotionally drained, and their questions, gentler than they’d asked me in the practice run, felt like they were about someone else. I heard later that some viewers lodged complaints with the television regulator anyway. There is a popular clip of it divided into two pixelated segments online. I guess it will pass down the generations over the cloud, so that in a hundred years, those interested in as grim a moment as that which made me what I am, will be able to turn to their computers, and see me lounging back as I discussed the massacre.

  It’s not the only interview they’ll be able to find. I was scheduled for two more before the television men probed past the novelty. One with an earnest lady who almost cried with me, and the other which lasted thirty gruelling minutes, and was cut down to five when it was shown on television. By the end of the second, I felt like I’d risen above a part of my memories, the part people were interested in. Television and its glamour had switched from one side of the ridge to the other. No longer part of the haze, it was dragging me down into a world of fixed images, fixed memories. I needed to move on.

  ‘They all want to hear the same thing, but they expect me to tell them something new. What’s the point?’ I told my mother, before she called to cancel the other interviews.

  ***

  As the days passed and I remained in the house, it became clear that I’d traded one confinement for another. In hospital, I’d been surrounded by a sea of strangers, directed by every uniform in sight, but at least there’d been the prospect of home. But now that I was home, I felt irremediably stuck. Everyone was tiptoeing around me. A mere weakling, I needed five inches of down padding me from the elements.

  I’d seen it during Mrs Hitchcliffe’s first visit. Her history books under one arm, honeyed sympathy all over her face, I’d made it through three-quarters of a lesson, nodding to everything she said, listening to nothing, until she shut her books and asked me whether everything was alright.

  ‘What do you think?’ I barked, and she gave me another of her compassionate smiles, the sort I’d never seen in class – there, true to her inner despot, she’d tolerated no dissent. We stopped the lesson for I clearly needed time. But what I really needed was Mrs Hitchcliffe as she’d been, for her to tell me to shut up and listen, to let me off with a warning this time, to punish me the next. When she left, she conferred with my mother, and together, without asking me a thing, they decided they’d start the lessons again when I felt better. Even my brother, who normally took a perverse pleasure in saying no to me, talked to me, played with me whenever I asked him to.

  In my head at least, life went as I wanted it to go. I trekked up glaciers, I sailed around Cape Horn, I drove to Siberia. I lived a life of adventure, wild and getting wilder, because I knew that when my imagination ran out, my reason would take over, and once again, I’d find myself stuck.

  The first person to call me was Harry Williams, the same Harry I’d consistently tried to sideline over the years, but who’d still weaselled his way into all of my friendship groups. The same Harry who’d reported a fictive conversation on television. And yet, when my mother called me towards the phone to talk to my ‘friend’ Harry, I had to remind myself that I didn’t like him, so that my voice wouldn’t sound too eager.

  ‘How’s it being a celebrity?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Well, you’re a big man now. Going on TV and all, getting your fifteen minutes of fame.’

  I could feel Harry’s familiar struggle with a joke. I’d often seen him interrupt group conversations a beat and a half late, starting with a sharp opening only to flounder with all eyes on him.

  ‘I’ve been on TV longer than fifteen minutes already.’

  ‘Exactly,’ he said, his tone tightening, ‘you’re not only a celebrity, you’re a hero. It’s all over the newspapers. Soon you’ll be solving the Middle East crisis.’

  I took a deep breath, harnessing my anger.

  ‘Handing bread to Africans?’ I said.

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘Why are you telling me all this, Harry?’

  ‘Because everyone’s saying it.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Everyone at school. Everyone.’

  ‘So, you’re just repeating what everyone else is saying. And, do you have anything of your own to tell me? Or are you only good at repeating what others said?’

  He mumbled an answer and I hung up. I went back downstairs, set the phone in its base, and stood by the French windows, looking at the garden. There, where no one could see me, I smiled, proud of what I’d told him, happy that someone had been angry with me.

  Later I would have ready answers for such comments. Most of the times, I’d laugh along: ‘Fun, I went for a joyride last night but I must have flown too close to Krypton. I’m feeling knackered today.’ Sometimes, I gave my meaner self more leeway: ‘It takes a special talent. And now that I know it, I can tell you that I haven’t met too many people with it. Well, maybe one. No, actually, zero.’ Only once did I bark back. It was Beth’s brother, and I called him a twat.

  But most importantly, I learned to ignore the malice they disguised. I laughed, I retorted, and I forgot. Veni, vidi, vici. Nate-style.

  That day, just like every day before it, my mother came and asked me how my work was going. For the first time, I told her the truth.

  ‘It’s not. I’m not doing any work.’

  I was lying on my bed, my chin hanging down over the edge, my eyes staring at three threads coming undone from the carpet. She sat down on my desk chair and swivelled to face me.

  ‘Yes, I’ve noticed. I went to see the Master of Balliol today. He said they’d accept you on your predicted scores alone. Which were fine. All you need is to pass your A-levels.’

  I nudged my nail under one of the loose threads and pulled until she left the room. I couldn’t speak to my mother: she was part of the world I needed to flee.

  ***

  Rereading over what I’ve written, I realise it sounds like I was spending weeks alone. That wasn’t the case. My life went beyond books and my brother. Once a week, my mother took me to hospital, where they monitored my progress and gave me instructions I ignored religiously.

  And on most Friday nights, I met up with Beth and a few others, the ones I had left, to watch a movie and get drunk. Since I’d seen her at hospital, Beth had adopted a new style – bright red lipsticks to go with a red hat and red boots. One night on a bus, when we were both sitting drunk, we turned towards each other. It started with a peck, and then, for a minute, her tongue thrust deep against mine. We stopped just as abruptly as we started, and we never mentioned the moment again.

  It’s not that I was secluded, but that, however hard I tried, I always needed more. Alcohol, books, movies, they distracted me for a while, but in the end they only ever gave my thoughts further to fall. Some days, I looked around my r
oom, saw everything I’d seen the day before, and I blamed myself, ramping up the insults, hoping it would spur me on. On others, I told myself that it was my mother’s fault: if only she could understand how I felt, I’d be able to get my frustration out and move on. And on some others still, I lashed out at society. It was an easy target: I had friends who couldn’t connect, journalists who hadn’t listened, a policeman who’d stared down at me through his large square glasses. And when I needed more, I could focus on a broader culture that glorified something – I didn’t know what – that made me sick.

  In late March, my mother asked me to come and help her do the shopping. At first reluctant, I finally agreed when she said we’d be going all the way to Witney. She had to pick up a dress there. Whenever we went shopping, my mother divided up her list, kept two-thirds for herself, including all the fresh produce, and sent me around the aisles to get the rest.

  While looking for washing powder, I saw the back of Jeffrey’s mother’s head. She was pushing a trolley towards the toiletries aisle, while one of her daughters, ponytail flailing, was holding an arabesque with one foot on the trolley’s chassis and the other stretched far behind her. With a sudden pang of guilt, I doubled back and hid behind a canned olives stand, spying down two aisles until I felt sure the way was clear. I wouldn’t know what to say if they asked me about Jeffrey. They deserved more than I could tell them. As I continued with my list, or with what I could decipher from my mother’s scribbles, I almost bumped into them twice, but, both times, I heard the girl singing before it was too late.

  ‘Nate, are you done?’ my mother called. I turned around to see her pushing a full trolley my way. ‘Let me see,’ she said, grabbing my list. ‘Good, good. Almost perfect. Can you go and get the aqua colour version of this, please? I’ll be at the till.’

  I came back with the right product in hand just as Jeffrey’s sister was slotting in behind my mother, her gaze skipping over the rows of gum, chocolate, and gossip magazines. Pushing past her, apologising, I saw a faint flicker of recognition.