Chalk

by Paul Cornell

  * * *

  On the Tuesday afternoon, after having experienced the new dread and pleasure of listening to the Top 40 being revealed live on Radio 1 (Bowie was still at Number One, so I had no relief), I cycled into Calne on Aunt Dar’s bike, and went to the shop that sold sofas and carpet, fridges and records. I found nine of the singles, but they didn’t have ‘Back on the Chain Gang’. I’d been planning on putting the remaining money into a charity tin. Now I’d have to keep it until I could find that last record.

  Tomorrow was the first of Mrs. Coxwell’s revision classes. I could give Angie back the other records, but say I wanted to keep that one a bit longer. If I had to admit that I’d broken it, well, it was just one, that could be explained. I would stop Waggoner from hurting her, and stay away from her after that, and try not to think about all the amazing possibilities raised by her note, and not ask her any questions about it that might make Waggoner act against her there and then.

  How could I make sure Waggoner wouldn’t break the new records overnight? I pretended to go to bed, waited until I was certain Mum and Dad were asleep, and then got up again. I tried to revise, but I couldn’t. So I wrote stories through the night. I fell asleep around 5:00 a.m., and he moved straight for the package, but his movement jerked me awake, and I put my hands on it and stopped him.

  ‘I can give her back the records,’ I said, my voice as quiet as it could be. ‘Then she’ll have no more power over us.’

  * * *

  I sealed up the nine records in almost as tight a package as they’d arrived in, and clutched it to my chest, wary that Waggoner might try to grab them or trip me.

  Being driven all the way to school was weird. I told Dad to drop me off, and walked up the long driveway. The buildings were silent. There was just that wind in the trees, the noise that had been under all the misery on the run. I looked back down the drive and considered being here and not feeling horror, not feeling the ache that still stretched down my abdomen and into my legs.

  It was weirder still in our form room, to see everyone dressed not in uniform, but in what they would normally be dressed in. This was bad. I was in my brown cord slacks and green jumper. Everyone else wore jeans. Mum had asked if I wanted jeans, and I’d said no, because they were what kids like Drake wore.

  You didn’t have to go to Mrs. Coxwell’s Maths revision class, so Blewly and Drake weren’t there, and neither was Fiesta. Incredibly, now I think about it, neither was Rove. Angie smiled at me quickly and looked away again.

  Waggoner took a step forward, but I held him back. He went to sit with Louise. She looked up at him with a smile. She seemed otherwise to be deliberately keeping herself apart. They started whispering to each other, sometimes looking at one kid or another, planning, judging.

  Angie was wearing very clean jeans, and a huge black jumper that fell off one shoulder, revealing her T-shirt underneath. Her makeup looked like she was ready to go out dancing, great swirls of red and black around her eyes.

  I sat down, and put the package under the desk. The lesson was a run- through, with examples, of everything we’d need to remember about Maths for the mocks next term. Mrs. Coxwell treated the class differently, maybe because we weren’t in uniform, or because we were there voluntarily. ‘Do you want five minutes’ rest?’ she asked. The class awkwardly said they did. Everyone stood up and walked about a bit. It was weird to have nothing definite to do. Mrs. Coxwell had sat down and got a flask out of her bag. She hadn’t called for silence.

  Louise left the room as fast as possible. Waggoner stayed, drawing endless patterns of circles in a rough book, so hard as to almost carve the pages. Angie was suddenly beside me. ‘Did you like the records?’ she said. Waggoner looked over at us, expectant.

  I picked up the package and handed it to her. ‘I . . . liked . . . some of them.’

  ‘Which ones?’

  ‘XTC.’

  ‘I thought you’d say that.’ She looked disappointed.

  ‘I liked Kate Bush as well.’

  ‘Did you?’ Her whole face lit up.

  I found that I was smiling too. Waggoner had gotten up and came over to stand behind me. I made myself stop. ‘But the best one was–’

  ‘Yeah?’

  I thought about the consequences of what I was about to do, but I also knew how I was going to get out of them. The white line I had in my head at times like this was just for once crossed out. ‘“Back on the Chain Gang”. That’s why it’s not in the package, I’d like to keep it for a bit–’

  She’d grabbed me, got halfway to hugging me in a moment, and then stopped. She’d let her hands quickly slap my shoulders and then let go. That incredible feeling of a girl having touched me, not violently, as she had before, but so tenderly she couldn’t actually complete the action. She’d leapt off the ground in delight. Now she took a couple of steps back, sweeping her hair away from her eyes.

  I cringed. I nearly curled up with the weight of it. But as I looked around again, still nobody was watching. It was like the world had changed to allow us this.

  ‘You read the Number Ones list?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  She looked suddenly vulnerable. ‘So . . . what did you think?’

  ‘Interesting,’ I said.

  She nearly grabbed me again, perhaps saw my startled reaction, and settled for touching my shirt. ‘I knew!’ she said. ‘I’d knew you’d understand.’

  Waggoner stepped between us, tried to shove me away. I pushed him back against the desk. He went sprawling between us. He glared up from where he landed.

  On Tuesday, Spandau Ballet went to Number One. Whatever question Angie had asked this mirror of hers, the answer was–

  ‘True.’

  Twenty-five

  May 1st was a Sunday. I pushed my bike along the A4, the long trudge up Cherhill Hill. It was raining. The wind buffeted my ears. I had to go somewhere, to get away from attempts to start revision that continuously failed.

  I was thinking a lot about all that I’d said to Elaine on the school bus. A meaning had been slowly condensing out of a cloud of things that had happened, and I was just starting to grasp the idea that I had done, that I could do, something terribly wrong.

  But Angie liked me anyway. She could like me despite knowing what I’d done. She could like Drake despite all he was. Maybe she knew about what he’d done to me too? I hated the idea that Drake and I could be held in the same mind, in the same breath.

  She’d done something to make me stop behaving that way to Elaine. She’d sent me the Valentine’s card for no other reason I could see, so that must have been it. It had worked, but I couldn’t see how. Was there another set of impossibilities in the world, going off in another direction from Waggoner’s, against them, even?

  Waggoner rode effortlessly beside me on his Raleigh Chopper, the wind at his back, looking determined. Cars passed us at high speed. My foot still hurt from where the shard of record had pierced it, and that connected with the continuing ache from my groin. I pointed to my foot. ‘You hurt me.’

  ‘For your own good. To stop her hurting you. By next Halloween, it’ll all be over, and you’ll be healed.’

  ‘Why by then?’ He didn’t reply. ‘Do you still have to do all this other stuff, with the horse, and whatever’s happened to Louise? Why did that happen with the blackboard?’

  ‘Because the teachers keep saying nothing’s ever changed, that people are people, and that’s a lie. Things have changed and changed, and people have changed too, and we hate it when people forget that, forget what’s underneath. We want to get back to before all the changes.’

  ‘We?’

  No answer. We were passing the entrance to the ‘easy way’ up to the downs, the track that led steeply, but more quickly, up the backs of the hills, right to Oldbury Castle. It looked wet and wild up there. ‘Answer me! Or I’ll . . . get rid of you!’

  ‘How?’

  ‘If I think hard enough–’

  ‘No. It’s bigger tha
n you. It’s very old, not like her music.’

  * * *

  We walked and cycled all the way to the Beckhampton roundabout, which people always said was made out of an old barrow, but no archaeology has been done on the bump in the middle. If you go one way from the roundabout, you end up at the prehistoric artificial mound of Silbury Hill, with West Kennet Long Barrow down that same road. If you go the other, you get to Avebury. We stood on the curb across from the Beckhampton roundabout, and I listened to the wind whipping the trees about with rain, and I wanted to be with people I didn’t know. I’d never had that feeling before.

  Waggoner was making to go towards Silbury. I cycled off in the direction of Avebury. After a while, I looked back through the rain, and saw that he was following.

  * * *

  Avebury is a village built inside an enormous prehistoric stone circle. Inside that circle, there are several smaller features made of standing stones, like the various interior chapels of a cathedral. There are earthen banks, still huge now, that, before thousands of years of erosion, must have been like the seating of a gigantic stadium.

  There’s a pub right in the middle of Avebury called The Red Lion. I cycled around the big turn that led into the village, let the bike run fast into its car park and stopped. I felt awkward at what I saw through the rain. This being May Day, there were travelers sitting on the steps of a bus decked out in anarchy symbols. They’d started a tiny campfire on the tarmac.

  Back then, Stonehenge was surrounded by barbed wire with claxons and security lights. So on festival days, the travelers tried to get in there, had a clash with the police, and then ended up at Avebury instead. Today and on the winter solstice, it was just the committed ones, but on the summer solstice, there’d be a lot of tension and large numbers of people hanging about the town. In the 1980s, there were riots about paganism on my doorstep.

  Waggoner wheeled his bike past the bus. ‘May Day,’ he said to me. ‘If you were at school, this would be a fine day for a blood sacrifice.’

  I’d never heard him talk quite like that before. It was like he was putting it on deliberately. ‘Don’t talk about sacrifices. That doesn’t feel . . . real.’

  ‘She’s luring you into saying things like that, judging what’s real and what’s not. As if pop music is real!’

  ‘What you just said, it’s . . . an excuse! For you to do . . . what you do.’

  ‘Look who’s talking. For you, it’s the excuse. For me, it’s real.’

  I started shouting. Suddenly. Out of nothing. ‘What you saw up on the downs, what made you, I think it’s all made up! You can’t use it as a reason!’

  He threw his bike down and walked right into me. ‘You want your revenge and nothing else? You want it simple?’

  ‘Yes! No! Yes!’

  ‘See? Revenge is complicated. It’s mixed up with everything, and something else got mixed up with it for you. Something else got mixed up with you! Don’t you want to be healed?’

  ‘I don’t want it. I don’t want it anymore.’ I was crying now, hot tears bursting out of me in this car park. I didn’t care who saw.

  He put his mouth right to my ear. ‘You want her. That’s all this is about. I understand you’re weak. That’s okay. You get a whiff of a girl, and you throw away law and justice and logic and history. You do what they all do. Something nice comes along, something like her, something like one of her “hit singles”, and you grab it, and you use it as a shield and you forget.’

  I let my bike fall to the ground. I grabbed my head. I was sure the people in front of the bus had been looking at us and laughing for a long time now but I didn’t care. ‘I’m going to do it!’ I shouted. ‘I’m going to get rid of you! I started to push my fingers into my eyes, into my nose and ears, grabbing my head like a melon that I wanted to burst. I was denying this reality.

  He came at me. He tried to punch me in the stomach, but I saw it coming, and his fist rebounded off my hip as I twisted out of the way. I grabbed his head, and we went round and round in a headlock. He lashed out at me with his foot and made me jump out of his way.

  The travelers were clapping and laughing. One girl in a long frock looked shocked, and was getting to her feet. I could hear shouts from the tables outside the pub. He shoved me, sent me reeling back. I fell into the fire. I felt the urgent heat through my coat. I yelled, tried to roll, heaved myself up. He threw himself on top of me, his fists driving into me. He was shouting like an animal. We rolled off the other side of the fire, kept rolling, slammed into the tyre of the bus. The traveler girl was staring at us, so hurt and astonished, not knowing what to do. I wonder if she hadn’t been included in the alteration to the world, or was wise enough to see past it. Did she see me fighting Waggoner, or was it just me there, a child slamming himself against the bus, having a punk fit?

  I know now that on Beltane, or Walpurgis Night as the Scandinavians call it, May 1st, kids leap through bonfires. That it’s part of what’s said to be an ancient ritual of sacrifice. It’s possible that even trying to break away like this, I was still locked into what was planned for me.

  I rolled away from the bus and ran, and he was after me. We ran past buildings, through tourists, through locals, out onto the grass, with the sheep and the stones. ‘Listen to me,’ he was bellowing. ‘I’m the one who’s free! You get rid of me, and what’s left? You get rid of me, and you’ll be spat on all your life!’

  I flew down into the trough between the earthen banks, tried to climb up the other side. He caught up with me, grabbed me off my feet, punched me hard in the face. I fell into the trough. It was wet down there, rain and mud. I was already soaked, and now there was blood coming from my mouth. I had a sheet of mud up the front of my clothes, and the back of my coat was burnt. He jumped on top of me, his knees on my chest. I punched him as hard as I could. He fell back, and I shoved my feet hard into the mud and was away. I ran the whole circle of the ditches around the village, with him just a few paces behind me. Then there was a path, hacked out of the grass, leading up to a gate, so I scrambled up on it, chalk and flint beneath my shoes again. I got through the gate, onto the road.

  A car shot by my hip, the driver blaring his horn.

  I ran on, my arms everywhere, mucky all over now, twigs and shit in my hair, yelling, blood from my mouth, the boy screaming out the bounds. There was a bring-and-buy sale set up outside the old barn. I ran to put the tables between me and Waggoner. He caught me; we hit the tables. What was on them went everywhere, and the lady behind them leapt up, crying out. He put his fingers into my throat, and held me there against the table that had collapsed onto the ground, my muddy hair slammed against the white cloth so hard it smeared. He held, but he could not choke. His fingers would not close. He started hitting my head against the table. Pounding and pounding. My hand found something. A hard corner of card in my palm. I swung it, intending to hit him with it, to get his hands away. I stopped because it felt too thin to hurt him. The square blocked the low sun.

  I realised what I was looking at: ‘Back on the Chain Gang’ by the Pretenders, on sale for 50p.

  Waggoner saw it at the same moment I did. He seemed surprised. He let go of me. He stumbled back. I got up. I held the record in front of me. ‘Not her,’ I said. ‘The others . . . but not her.’

  He finally nodded.

  My shaking hand found a 50p piece in my pocket. I handed it to the woman, who was starting to yell that it would cost a lot more than fifty pence, what I’d just done. ‘I’ll take this,’ I said, and ran.

  Twenty-six

  Monday was the start of the summer term, the term of the mock ‘O’ Levels and the bursary. Ripples of heat across the playing fields. The grass getting less wet and muddy. The shedding of coats, then pullovers, then not bringing them in at all.

  The mocks and the bursary. Nobody talked about them. They were written under everything. They were geography and history. Kids had still been talking about Selway at the end of last term. By the start of this term,
he was a different sort of history.

  Groups of boys in the distance, on the grass, and then suddenly there’d be a flurry, and two of them would be out of the edge of the group, grabbing at each other. It’d go on for a few seconds and then stumble into nothing, or get worse.

  The girls were silent, sitting together with books, forming sudden groups of solidarity with looks and comments and then breaking them again, every now and then one of them suddenly in tears, sometimes with a few to comfort her, sometimes left wandering into nothing on her own. Louise was in her element, joining a group for a few moments, talking determinedly, gesturing angrily, pointing at others in the distance, saying how so and so was a slut, how wrong they all were, how it was all getting worse and worse, how they needed old-fashioned values, which made one group of girls burst out laughing. The girls had given her a bit of leeway, but no more. They were all starting to shake their heads, to say she was mental now, to walk away when she approached. She seemed to secretly like that. I saw her smiling at it.

  Building, building towards something.

  It was hard to see where the changes to the school ended and where the feeling of pressure began. The completion of Waggoner’s plans felt obvious and likely.

  Drake and Blewly and Rove came after me all the time, telling me every chance they got what I was, who I loved, what I wanted to do. They got worse, by a tiny increment, every day. Waggoner stood beside me, not protecting me. It felt like they were cycling back towards once again cutting my cock off.

  In the evenings, I would walk around the lounge, telling Mum about The New Horse-Hoeing Husbandry, Jethro Tull and the Seed Drill as she was doing the ironing, all the things in the stories in my history revision. She’d stop me when I sounded like I was making stuff up. There was revision with me all the time, a book beside me at the dinner table, a book beside me as I was curled up around one of my stories. I heard Mum and Dad talking about taking my stories away from me until the mock exams, but they never tried.