On the way back Mr Beckwith walked a pace behind Alexander, as he used to do with Megan, and did not speak until they came to the top of the cliff, where they sat together cross-legged on the closely cropped grass, overlooking the beach. A black and white collie coursed across the sand; a man in voluminous swimming trunks swung a bat, and the impact of the ball sounded faintly at the cliff-top, like the click of a pen-cap. A trawler on the horizon was overtaken by the sky’s solitary bulbous cloud. ‘There’s our girl,’ said Mr Beckwith, raising an arm. ‘Off you go,’ he said, as though he thought Alexander had been waiting for permission to leave him.
Megan was walking with stiff, long strides and her head down, seeming to count her steps, and then she stopped and looked back towards the cliff, as if aware that he was following her. Putting her hand out like a relay runner receiving the baton, she continued her walk, smacking her feet onto the sand. She let him take her hand, but there was no pressure to her touch. It was as if her hand were something she was allowing him to carry.
‘You must have gone miles,’ she said.
‘We did.’
‘I’m going to the rock pools,’ Megan told him. ‘Mum’s asleep but your dad said it was all right.’
The tide was low and the sand they were treading was rippled like the soles of feet that have been in a bath too long. Megan released his hand and bent down to uproot an open razor clam. She scooped the runny sand from the shell into her palm and held it chest-high between them. ‘It makes you feel frightened when you think about what this is, doesn’t it?’ she said. ‘Look at those cliffs. All this sand has come from them, and one day they’ll be nothing but sand. Isn’t that frightening?’ Alexander regarded the pat of damp grains. ‘Like looking at the stars,’ said Megan. ‘You must do that sometimes?’
‘Yes.’
‘And what does it make you think? Doesn’t it make you frightened? You must think something.’
‘Makes me wish there were no clouds in the way.’
‘That isn’t a proper thought, Eck,’ said Megan sharply, and she shook the sand from her hand. ‘Some of them are millions and millions and millions of miles away. So many millions that what you’re looking at isn’t there any longer. The light is like a parcel sent by somebody who’s died before it reaches you. Isn’t that horrible?’ She watched Alexander as he inspected the sky. ‘The stars are there now, but we can’t see them because the sun’s out. Or did you think they all went off somewhere for the day?’
‘Of course not.’
‘But doesn’t it make you feel giddy?’
‘Doesn’t what?’
‘That a long time ago all this wasn’t here, and a long time from now it won’t be here any more.’
‘No,’ said Alexander. ‘It’s here now. We’re here now. I don’t think anything about the beach. It just is.’
‘Don’t be daft, Eck. Nothing just is.’
‘Well, you just are. I just am.’
‘No you’re not. You’re the son of your parents. You’re part of them.’
‘No I’m not.’
‘You are, Eck. Where do you think you came from?’
‘I know where I came from. I’m not thick.’
‘Well then. You look like your mum. Exactly like her. It’s not a coincidence. A part of you is her.’
‘No,’ protested Alexander. ‘All of me is me.’
‘Same with your dad,’ continued Megan.
‘I’m nothing like him.’
‘Your dad’s a bit serious and a bit scatty.’
‘He’s not. He’s not at all scatty.’
‘Yes, he is. He’s always larking about.’
‘I don’t lark about,’ Alexander complained.
‘Yes you do. You do silly voices.’
‘No I don’t.’
‘Eck, you do,’ said Megan emphatically. ‘You do other people’s voices.’
‘But that’s not silly voices.’
‘Yes, it is.’
‘What’s the point of this?’ he asked. ‘Why do you want to argue?’
‘I don’t, Eck. But you’re so sweet, I can’t help it,’ Megan told him, and she took his hand as they picked a route through the fallen stones.
They were on their own below Hoe Point, where Megan found a pool that was as smooth and long as a bathtub, with a fringe of spinach-coloured seaweed at one end, where she rested her head as she lay down. Water from the breaking waves frisked along the channels of the rocks and leaped into the pool. The water lapped at Megan’s goosefleshed thighs. Alexander would always remember this, and her hair twisted into unravelled plaits by the saltwater, and the freckles of dried salt that were mixed with the freckles of her cheeks.
Alexander watched the gulls wheeling out from the cliff where he had sat with Mr Beckwith. The birds made no noise now, and evening was beginning. The white flecks on the sea were like flowers that nobody would ever be able to pick.
‘You haven’t blinked for a minute,’ said Megan. ‘What are you thinking about?’
‘Not again,’ he moaned. ‘I’m just looking, Meg.’
‘Looking without thinking anything. I don’t believe you. It’s not possible.’
‘There’s a lot to look at.’
She looked at him as if pretending to be baffled. ‘Faraway Eck,’ she said, and she put her arms around his shoulders as a sister might have done.
‘Odd Eck,’ he responded. Creamy water hurried up through the gullies and touched his toes.
And he would remember the pyramid of towels packed onto a saddle of sand between two clumps of grass, and his father handing Mr Beckwith his Brownie camera. His father and mother and Mrs Beckwith stood at the back, their arms folded as if they were footballers in a team photograph. Alexander knelt in the sand by a mat of black seaweed that was baked as stiff as wicker, and Megan looped her arm through his. He looked back to see his mother picking a windblown strand of hair from her face. ‘Come on, Harry,’ said Mrs Beckwith. ‘The tide’ll wash us away before you press that blasted shutter.’ Mr Beckwith’s smile appeared at the side of the camera. Drifts of dry sand were moving down to the sea, flexing like snakes in their sidelong flight. A dog came running through the marram grass and Alexander wanted someone to ask him if he was happy because he wanted an excuse to say it, because he had realised that he had never been happier than he was at that moment, looking over Mr Beckwith’s shoulder and seeing the colour that the setting sun was painting on the rocks of Rinsey Head and the engine house of the Wheal Prosper mine.
10. Monty
Mr Owen had been at the school for no more than a month when, one morning after assembly, he stopped Alexander in the corridor, outside Mr Darrow’s room, and said to him in an aggrieved tone of voice: ‘Montgomery is an hero, is he not?’
‘Sir,’ Alexander agreed, after a hesitation, having heard ‘Anne Eero’.
‘Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, commander of the Eighth Army and victor of El Alamein, is an hero.’ Mr Owen shifted his feet as if adjusting his balance on a moving deck, and his plimsolls squealed on the stone floor. ‘He is a man who has achieved things. Stupendous things. He is a leader of men,’ said Mr Owen.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘A leader of men you are not.’
‘No, sir,’ Alexander replied, puzzled as to what he might have done to offend Mr Owen. His classmates were passing behind Mr Owen, filing in for the English lesson. John Halloran glanced at Alexander and grimaced in sympathy.
‘So?’ demanded Mr Owen. He wiped a hand over the crown of his head, as if to quell his exasperation.
‘Sir?’
‘What is the connection, MacIndoe? Where is the relevance?’
Still having no notion what Mr Owen was talking about, Alexander assumed a posture of contrition, fixing his gaze on the books he was holding to his waist.
‘Simple question, lad. It’s not an algebra problem. All I want to know is what’s the connection?’
At the window of Mr Darrow’s room appeared a
sheet of paper on which the word ‘MAD’ was crayoned in capital letters. Lionel Griffiths’ head rose into view beside it, with a finger tapping at his temple. All of a sudden Alexander understood. ‘Not that Monty, sir,’ he said.
‘I beg your pardon?’ queried Mr Owen, his lip crumpling into a sneer.
‘It’s not that Monty, sir.’
‘What do you mean, MacIndoe? “Not that Monty”? There is only one Monty.’
‘No, sir, there’s another one. It’s the other one, sir. Montgomery Clift.’
‘Montgomery Clift?’ Mr Owen repeated in an outraged shriek.
‘The actor, sir. The Search. Red River. A Place in the Sun.’
‘Yes, yes. I am not an ignoramus, MacIndoe.’ Momentarily deflated, Mr Owen looked without interest at Alexander’s books, and then he looked Alexander in the eye and instantly rediscovered his indignation. ‘Montgomery Clift? The gooey American?’
‘Sir.’
‘That long lump of unbaked dough?’
‘Yes, sir. They think I look like him. Some of them do.’
‘Is that so?’ Mr Owen rejoined, and the delayed repercussions of a thought spread across his features, like a gust of wind rippling the grass on a hill. The sneer subsided, to be succeeded by a look of placid distaste. ‘Nothing like him, if you ask me,’ he said.
‘I don’t see it either, sir,’ Alexander replied.
‘Whatever could they be thinking of, eh?’ Mr Owen rubbed the toe of one plimsoll with the toe of the other, then looked at Alexander’s face as if it were a tepidly amusing drawing that a child had done. ‘Off you go, MacIndoe.’
The gymnasium was beyond a pair of storage rooms and a padlocked classroom that he was never to see open, at the end of a corridor that smelled of stale canvas and rubber and skin and coconut matting. The way in was through the changing rooms, where in the morning the dairy-white tiles gleamed in the light that came in through the gymnasium door. From the playground the pointed high windows of the gymnasium and the terracotta plaques on the wall gave it the look of a chapel, and there was something church-like in its appearance in the morning, before it had been used. Some mornings Alexander would arrive at school early and enter the corridor by the door that led to the playground, and if nobody was around he would creep between the steel mesh clothes-racks, and go into the quiet, high-ceilinged hall. The painted white lines on the parquet he could see as the patterns on the floor of an aisle, and he could see the vaulting horse, standing against the end wall behind a painted semicircle, as an altar of sorts, capped with its pad of blood-red leather. Between the windows on both sides the wall-bars were arrayed like tiers of memorials. Looped over the bars, the ropes made curves like stone vaulting, rising to the rings by which they were attached to the rafters. Until five minutes before the bell was due to ring he would sit under a window, listening to the voices growing louder outside, fortifying himself with the emptiness of the gymnasium before crossing the playground to his classroom.
Mr Owen’s lessons always began the same way. They would await his arrival in a line across the centre of the gymnasium, facing the changing-room door, through which the squeak of Mr Owen’s plimsolls would be heard and then, a few seconds before he appeared, his command: ‘To attention!’ Swivelling on his heels, he closed the door, leaving his hand on the knob for a moment, an action that signified that he was not merely shutting a door but imprisoning them for his thirty minutes. ‘All here?’ he would ask, before squeaking towards them, reciting a selection from his roster of nicknames. ‘Hercules Halloran here; Goliath Griffiths here; Tiny Tim Pottinger here,’ he would call out, while Alexander concentrated on the great volume of air above their heads. ‘The Mighty Pickering here; Girly MacIndoe here; Fat Boy Radford here,’ Mr Owen would call out, smiling to himself.
‘One day, one day,’ Mick Radford once muttered as he retrieved a medicine ball that Mr Owen had thrown at him, and the phrase became the class’s refrain. ‘One day, one day,’ repeated John Halloran, peeling a handkerchief from his bleeding shin. ‘One day, one day,’ promised Timothy Pottinger, running cold water over a rope burn, before writing ‘One’ on the underside of the tongue of his left plimsoll, and ‘Day’ on the tongue of the right.
That day arrived at the end of an unseasonably cold week, near the end of term. It was a dark morning, as Alexander would remember, and it became darker and colder during the walk to school. Hail started to fall during assembly, and pools of melting ice were forming in the playground as they crossed to the gymnasium.
Alexander took his place in the line, underneath the basketball hoop. Locking and unlocking his fingers as Mr Owen would do when watching them exercise, he leaned forward to look at John Halloran. He licked his palm and swiped it across his hair from brow to nape, and blinked as if unable to credit the evidence of his eyes. ‘Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear,’ he said. ‘What an abomination. Yes. You. An Johnny Weissmuller you are not, Halloran.’ He put his hands behind his back and flexed his knees, like Mr Owen did, and mimicked Mr Owen’s dry, mirthless laugh: ‘uck, uck, uck’. Roy Pickering bit his lip to prevent a smile. ‘I don’t know what you find so funny, Pickering. You are an fairy, are you not?’ Roy Pickering’s lip was turning white under the pressure of his teeth, and it was then that Alexander saw that Mr Owen had come soundlessly into the gymnasium, and was closing the door.
‘You’re dead, Monty,’ whispered Mick Radford. ‘I’ll bring the wreath.’
But Mr Owen did not appear to have heard Alexander. ‘Come on. Jump to it! In line!’ he ordered, looking at nobody in particular. ‘Right then, girls,’ he shouted in his usual exultant voice. ‘Ten sit-ups, ten squats, ten press-ups. Spread out. Now. Get to it.’ As he did every day, he wandered among them, ordering one to stand and explain the state of his singlet, another to account for the hole in his shoes. ‘Sloppy, Pickering, sloppy. Parents got no pride?’ Grinding the keys in the pocket of his tracksuit, he stood over David Kingsley. ‘Oh come on, Kingsley. This is pathetic. My grandmother could do better.’ He spun round to shout at Roy Pickering: ‘You seem to think you could do better, Pickering. Ten extra press-ups. Yes. You. Now. Get to it.’
Mr Owen wiped his hair; the flesh above his mouth flinched as if he had toothache. ‘Right, then,’ he said, in the doom-laden tone that always signified the same thing. ‘Your favourite game. Captains Allerton and Fletcher. Come here.’ Neil Allerton swaggered to his place on Mr Owen’s right hand, rotating his arms as if swinging Indian clubs; Dennis Fletcher stood on his left, regarding his classmates with a compromised look. ‘Allerton first,’ said Mr Owen, and so Allerton and Fletcher took turns to choose the members of their teams. Only Lionel Griffiths and John Halloran were left after Alexander had been selected for Allerton’s squad.
Mr Owen had left the gymnasium while the captains made their choices, and now he returned, cajoling a football along the floor with dainty taps of his instep. He inspected the teams. ‘No, no,’ he decided. ‘Too many weeds in this brigade. MacIndoe, go to Fletcher. You too, Malinowski. I’ll join Allerton’s mob. Form up.’
They adopted their skittle formations at opposite ends of the hall. Mr Owen nudged the ball towards Fletcher’s team, then pushed his way into the midst of Allerton’s. ‘Fletcher, your man,’ said Mr Owen.
Paul Malinowski, from his place at the point of the triangle, chipped the ball softly into the midst of the opposition. The boy whom the ball had first struck stepped out of the formation, taking care that his gratitude was not apparent. ‘Ten squats, ten press-ups, ten sit-ups,’ Mr Owen ordered. The boy withdrew to the sector of the gymnasium where the eliminated players did their penance, while Malinowski went back to his position.
Allerton’s front player kicked the ball hard and low into Fletcher’s formation, dislodging Malinowski. A member of Fletcher’s front line retaliated with a powerful strike, and thus the game proceeded until Alexander, the last survivor of his row, faced Mr Owen. Alexander would remember the way Mr Owen put the ball softly on the circle
of blue paint in the middle of the floor, then turned it two or three times, as if locking a manhole cover. He would remember seeing the wet leaves swabbing the glass of the windows to Mr Owen’s left, and noticing for the first time the pelt of dust on top of the rafter closest to the door, while in the periphery of his vision Mr Owen took a pace backwards. Then he realised that Mr Owen was taking more than a single pace. He saw Mr Owen look at the ball, at him, at the ball, again at him, and dash forward, his face still up.
There was no pain to the blow immediately, just a sound like the sizzle of lard in a hot pan, and a warm dribble over his lips. His head felt too heavy on the floor. A long way away, Mr Owen’s feet were splayed like a penguin’s; there were other feet close by, rocking from heel to toe. No one approached him. The ball was at rest against his arm; he placed his hand on it, and felt the texture of the matt leather, the rib-like laces and the yielding rubber nipple between them. With no thought of what he was doing, he scooped the ball into his lap and lifted it. He stood up dizzily, and then he dropped the ball and kicked it on the half-volley. Indifferently he saw Mr Owen double over. He could feel the air congeal about him.
Mr Owen unfolded himself and looked pensively around the gymnasium. He contemplated the cages that protected the light bulbs on the walls; his gaze skimmed over the boys’ faces, and his head nodded in agreement with himself. When at last he spoke, his voice was precise and low, and pleasant. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Continue this game without me. Then the same teams for an end-to-end relay. Then out on the field for a few laps. Allerton, keep order.’ He fetched the ball from the corner of the room and handed it to Allerton. ‘MacIndoe. You come with me.’
Mr Owen led him through the changing rooms and out into the corridor, where he opened the outside door. ‘Please,’ he said, ushering Alexander into the rain. ‘If you’d oblige,’ Mr Owen requested, indicating that Alexander should move farther away. Alexander took a backwards step, into the puddle that was spreading from the drain; the cold water flowed over the tops of his plimsolls. From the shelter of the doorway Mr Owen looked at Alexander with the expression of someone trying to understand why the shivering boy had chosen to stand in ankle-deep water. ‘Now, Monty,’ began Mr Owen solicitously. ‘We have a choice. We could proceed forthwith to the headmaster’s office. It is my belief that a measure of corporal punishment would ensue from this course of action. A report to your parents might follow. To be frank, Monty, I would stake my job on such an outcome. In fact, not to beat about the bush, I would make damned sure of it.’ He stooped forward to inspect the sky and made a snort of satisfaction. ‘Or we could resolve this matter now and have done with it. What do you say, Monty? The choice is yours.’
Ghost MacIndoe Page 11