The Claude Glass
Page 16
After a time, there was a gleam of yellow hair in the crowd around the school doors, and Tara emerged in the playground, pausing to exchange a few words with Jim Garraway. Standing in the gateway, Andrew waited for her to turn, to smile and walk towards him, but then he heard a noise to his right and he realised, to his horror, that Adam was sitting in the truck, tapping out his pipe against the hollow metal door. Too scared to think, he shrank behind a gatepost, and as Tara arrived on the pavement she passed so close to him that he could have brushed his hand against her brilliant-coloured skirt.
Mr Gwynne, Andrew noticed, was standing by the classroom wall, turning his glasses in his hands. He was watching, too, as Adam leant from the window, put his arms around Tara’s waist and hoisted her up into the cab. For a moment, his face disappeared beneath her luminous hair, his fingers tightening on her shoulders, and the roar of the truck was louder than ever as it moved away up the hill.
* * *
The crowd had shrunk by the time that Andrew turned to go inside. He walked with his head down, his eyes on his dusty brown shoes and the many-coloured lines that crossed one another with impossible complexity in the playground. He didn’t look up because he didn’t want to see anybody, now Tara had gone, and he looked instead at people’s feet: sandals of latticed leather, heels that shrank to a spike at the ground, a pair of neat blue shoes with sun-pink calves, which he followed through the open glass doors – into the hall, where he followed the wall to his peg with its picture of a tractor, where the door to the classroom revealed the room-wide windows, the colourless fields and the web of the deep green hedgerows.
Andrew turned when he heard a pair of voices behind him, although in the classroom a dozen or more children were preparing for assembly, chattering, dragging the mats and arranging the benches in lines. He could smell the hay smell from the fields, the chemicals on the floor, and he was watching as Robin and Nigel appeared from the corridor – smiling and talking, carrying piles of red hymn books.
“Up in the Elan Valley reservoirs,” said Robin, “you can see the old church spire coming right up out of the water! That’s what Cloud says. And sometimes, at night, you can even hear the church bells!”
“I have got to see that!” said Nigel.
“We’re going to go and see it this weekend!” said Robin. “When we take Cloud back home, we’re going to go and see the reservoirs, and she’s going to show me a barn that’s come completely out of the water and normally you can’t see it at all!”
The two of them reached the bottom of the stairs and Robin looked in Andrew’s direction, but his expression scarcely altered – only his cheeks seemed to flush – and to Andrew it was as if he was looking straight through him, out past the playground, towards the main road and the fading flanks of Offa’s Bank – as if he was hardly there at all, like a ghost.
“We’re going to stay at Cloud and Klaus’s for four whole days,” Robin went on, “and they’ve got a model of a Chinese dragon at their house that looks just like the real thing!”
A bastard – that was what Adam had called Philip. A bastard. And Andrew grasped the rucksack on his shoulder, the hair beginning to prickle on the back of his head, a dreadful fear at the bottom of his stomach. Call me a bastard, would you? Philip had been shouting as Adam climbed back into his truck. Come on, what’s the matter with you?! Call yourself a farmer! You fucking start it! Andrew remembered the sound as Adam started the engine and simply drove away. He remembered the moment when his puppy had turned lifeless in his hands, the prickling spreading down his spine, across his shoulders, up onto his scalp until he felt like he would explode. And, as Nigel pushed past him, all he really wanted was for Robin to look at him properly, as if he existed at all.
* * *
On the regular black-and-white squares of the floor, Andrew lifted his head, unable to remember what had just happened. There was a pain in his leg and a thumping in his skull, which made his thoughts leaden and confused. He looked around him and saw hymn books in their dozens – some of them lying neatly, while others were crumpled and ripped – and beyond the hymn books Nigel was curled against the shoe-cages, howling and cradling his arm, while a little further away Robin was crying too, staring at him, and there was blood in streaks on his torn white T-shirt.
Andrew looked into his memory and found little but a dark, swilling emptiness. His fingers were sticky, clenched around a small, familiar object, and there were pieces of glass in his hand. He didn’t feel upset, merely concerned for Robin since his bleeding did seem quite bad and he thought that perhaps he should try and do something to stop it. But then Mr Gwynne came running out of the classroom, and Andrew realised that the pain in his leg was very bad, and that he had cuts on his hands, so he began to cry as well.
“What on earth..?” demanded Mr Gwynne, his voice trembling.
“He attacked us!” Nigel wailed. “He was grabbing that stupid mirror, and he bit my arm! We didn’t do anything, he just attacked us!”
“Oh, Jesus…” said Mr Gwynne.
“He was like an animal!” Nigel continued.
Mr Gwynne looked quickly at all three of them, then he bent down next to Robin and, talking to him quietly, he peeled off his T-shirt to reveal a long, thin cut across his stomach – not serious, but with blood leaking nastily from several places. The entire class was now assembled in the doorway beside them, and as the first of the Juniors arrived on the steps Mr Gwynne despatched him to find the first-aid kit, talking quietly as he turned his attention to Nigel.
“Look!” Nigel was insisting. “Look – he bit me on the arm!”
“Andrew.” Mr Gwynne turned to him, finally. “Andrew, are you okay? What on earth just happened?”
Andrew looked up at him, sitting upright now, but he couldn’t seem to make any sense of the words that Mr Gwynne was saying, so he simply looked back at the teacher’s face, at the eyebrows bunched together, the dark, rumpled hair. Then he decided to lie down again and close his eyes, and there, despite the heat, despite the reek of the chemicals on the floor beside him, despite the commotion, the crying and the shouting, he could still smell the smells of Werndunvan: the sleepy dogs arranged between the big, open doors, the pots bubbling tirelessly on the Rayburn, the fragrance of the hay, the sunlight piercing the holes in the roof of the house, drying out the mould and the grass which had once been trying to grow there.
* * *
There was a path in the garden that only Andrew knew about, and it was so narrow and tortuous that even he had to crawl to follow much of it – sliding beneath the trunks of fallen trees and squeezing between their branches. The garden was a fantastical place, full of plants which gangled high into the air while their roots scrabbled outwards over the soil, as if they had no interest at all in going underground and were more interested in communing with the shrubs, with the eruptions of purple flowers and the clusters of earth-brown bull rushes.
In the middle of all this wilderness, there were people made of stone – some of them without fingers or faces, others sinking slowly into the earth while their hands reached upwards into the dark, fleshy foliage. As he crawled among them, Andrew imagined that this was an entirely different kingdom, that he was a king who had returned to his country, and he pictured himself in his rightful palace, the finest that man had ever seen, seated on his throne, tending his sheep, which were boundless and had never lost a lamb.
Beyond the house, far behind him, there were the sounds of cars in the yard. Unfamiliar voices were shouting Andrew’s name – calling for him at intervals – and when a twig caught the bandages wrapped around his hands, he pulled them off quickly and left them lying on the ground.
The path ended at the edge of the plantation, having tunnelled for several yards beneath a bank of flowering brambles. Andrew returned to his feet, brushed some of the dirt from the front of his shirt, his jacket and his trousers, and sniffed at the resinous smell in the air, the order and the shadows. Then he set off briskly down the hill into
the narrow little valley which ran beside the house, dodging the oil drums and the plastic crates, murmuring a tune to himself while the lines of the pines shrunk off towards the bottom of the world.
There was a pool at the head of the dingle, which was Andrew’s favourite place on the whole farm. Beside it, there were a pair of seats cut back into the slope: levels of moss-covered rock, girdled in white and yellow flowers, and so old, so worn, that they might have belonged to the house itself.
Andrew sat on one of the seats and he imagined that Di was sitting on the other. Once the spring had cascaded from the hillside, but now it was just a bowl of cracked earth with a puddle in its middle scarcely larger than his hand. He watched as an insect danced on the surface of the water, and as he watched he took the little case from his pocket, slid open the clasp and ran his fingers across the place where there had once been a mirror, where there was now just a space of brownish metal. The circles spread from the feet of the dancing insect, round and perfect, growing as far as the puddle would allow. They were green from the layers of the trees, blue from the sky, brown from the earth, and as Andrew watched them he felt the vague, dizzy feeling rising up in him until, after a time, it was as if there was nothing but these circles in any direction, spreading away from him as far as he could see.
Also by Tom Bullough
A
Konstantin
Copyright
Sort Of thank Peter Dyer and Henry Iles for cover and text design.
For author information:
www.tombullough.com
The Claude Glass © Tom Bullough 2007
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher except for the quotation of brief passages in reviews
Published in 2007 by
Sort Of Books, PO Box 18678, London NW3 2FL
A catalogue record for this book is available from
the British Library
Print ISBN 978–0954899516
ePub ISBN 978–1–908745–22–4