Chalk

by Paul Cornell

  On that first day back, I had ‘Back on the Chain Gang’ in my bag, ready to give to Angie. I’d carefully made a little tear in one corner, like I remembered from her copy. She looked over to me at first break, across the grounds. It felt again like everyone was watching. Even more so, with the gravity bearing down.

  She came over to me anyway. ‘Hi,’ she said.

  I could feel Drake looking. Waggoner beside me turned aside. I put the record into her hands. ‘Thanks.’

  She frowned at it, then at me. ‘This is a different one. Like all the others were. What did you do?’

  I couldn’t answer.

  ‘Did you break them or summat?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Never mind. Same singles. So. Do you want to talk about my note? Do you want to know what was “true”?’

  I managed another nod.

  ‘Great. Mum says you have to come over and visit, so that’s on the first weekend of half-term, okay?’

  I think I must have nodded once again.

  * * *

  Kids had started playing British Bulldog. Someone had said it had been banned once. You formed two teams, facing each other across a stretch of playing field. You wrapped your arms round yourself, or put your hands in your pockets, and then each team ran at the other, and tried to knock them over. Anyone who got to the other side stayed in for the next round. Sometimes you ended up with loads of kids from one side all running at one kid on the other.

  So many fights in those weeks. Not just Surtees and Fiesta and Cath and me getting wrestled and punched. Even the football kids, with each other. Surtees and I grabbed each other, we slammed each other, we tumbled with each other awkwardly, and me and Cath, punches that bounced off each other’s fists, stances and expressions that made the other kids laugh, and sometimes leap in. Fiesta just ran away, shouting carefully that no, he wasn’t going to fight us. The teachers had stopped coming outside at break times.

  * * *

  On the Tuesday, I listened very closely to what kids in the playground were saying about the charts. I had no idea what would be Number One. Whatever it was would affect Angie’s life again, like ‘True’ must have, and I was going over to her house that weekend, and would get some answers. The Number One turned out to be ‘Candy Girl’ by New Edition. I thought for a moment that DJ Gary Davies had made a mistake.

  That evening, the phone rang, and Mum answered it. ‘It’s Angie Boden, for you,’ she said. She sounded as scared as I was.

  ‘You see what it’s like?’ Angie said as soon as I picked up the phone. ‘Where did that come from?’ That’s what you’ll be thinking to yourself. It’s like a bloody roller coaster ride!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The charts!’ She wouldn’t say anything more about that. She wanted to sort out the details of me coming over.

  * * *

  Angie’s parents lived on the married quarters at RAF Lyneham. On the way over there, that Saturday, the first day of the half-term break, Dad proudly told me that Mr. Boden was a squadron leader with Transport Command, and he’d now done some business with him. So what did I think of Angie?

  It took me such a long time to find the right words. ‘Good,’ I said.

  Dad told Mrs. Boden he’d be back to pick me up at six. Angie’s bedroom door had a wipeboard on it, with COME IN written on it in big red letters. I knocked.

  * * *

  The curtains of Angie’s room were half drawn. There was a bed that I looked at, and then didn’t. She also had a sink. It took me a moment to realise Waggoner wasn’t beside me. I looked back to the doorway. He was standing in the hall, trying not to look angry. Around the doorway were Blu-tacked sheets of paper. I went to look. I recognised song lyrics. Waggoner glowered for a moment more, then walked away.

  ‘Close the door,’ said Angie. She was sitting at her dressing table, wearing jeans and a baggy black jumper. ‘You can sit on the bed.’

  I did. It gave slightly beneath me. I put my feet firmly on the floor. On the ceiling was a piece of bright blue glossy paper, like a window to a blue sky. On it were Smash Hits! stickers. There was Bananarama in the middle, a ring of twelve others around them: Spandau Ballet, Wham!, Eurythmics, Duran Duran, Heaven 17, Tracey Ullman, JoBoxers, Yazoo, The Belle Stars, Paul Young, New Order, UB40. The paper looked ragged, like the stickers had been replaced many times.

  ‘Bananarama?’ I asked. I couldn’t help it. This list was so utterly divorced from anything Drake’s lot could like. If Drake ever lay on this bed, he’d spend the next hour taking the piss out of Angie. Probably. Hopefully.

  ‘Bananarama.’ She stood up, and for one horrifying moment I thought she was going to sit beside me, but instead she went to the window. ‘Somehow, they seem to know. When they were on Swap Shop, I wanted to call them up and ask. Keren, the young one. Sarah, a bit serious. Siobhan, it’s her group; she’s in charge. They’re missing someone. There should really be a secret fourth member, or one we only hear about later. If I called up, Siobhan would understand what I was saying. She’d want to keep me on the phone, take down my number so we could talk more later. But she couldn’t do that, because they wouldn’t have let me give out my phone number on live TV. So in the end I didn’t call.’ She was different here, still serious, but calm. ‘Mum and Dad think I’m a bit mental. They keep sending me to see doctors and keeping me off stuff at school. But I’m all right; I have my stuff. It’s that school that’s wrong.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. Then I found I was nodding violently. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘We’re meant to think the school building is historic and epic and everything, but it just looks shoddy to me. The future’s better than the past. Or what’s the point?’ She went and sat on the stool in front of the mirror on her dressing table, and beckoned me over. ‘Here’s where I ask the questions.’ So this was the mirror from the list. It was indeed warped and cracked. A jagged line ran right across its centre. The mirror had spaces for pictures in the frame all around the glass, and in those gaps, Angie had slotted images of loads of pop stars, more than one in each gap, crowding in. ‘That’s everyone I could find a sticker of who’s ever had a Number One. I think me putting them in there from years back was why it started answering me the way it does. I started doing it because it worked in fairy tales, and then I realised that, three times in a row, the questions were answered by the title of the next number one single. The question I asked this week, if you’re wondering, was about who most hated me. Turns out it’s who I thought it was, the “Candy Girl”. Louise. You know, she gives out all that stuff from cooking? She says she hates everything about me now. I don’t talk about serious things, apparently. I’m being “distracted”. I think she’s gone weird like a lot of things have gone weird. But you want to know about the Number One before that. You want to know what’s “True”?’

  I nodded again.

  ‘I asked the mirror what you were.’ I must have looked astonished, because she burst out laughing. ‘So I’ve decided you’re weird like I’m weird, and not weird like school and Louise have got weird.’ I wanted to say that she’d made a very dangerous assumption. I could think of another way I might be ‘true’, that my story was true, not my friendship, that she should listen if I told her about Waggoner and what had made him, what Drake had done to me. The mirror had a limited vocabulary. To really answer her question would have required such a prog rock title that it could never be a Number One single. ‘Pop music,’ she said, ‘can change everything, take you away, tell you what people are really like, let you see the future. It can take you from being one thing and make you into another.’ I had only ever danced the once in public. It had felt like that. ‘You can draw on it when you need to, using the words. I say them under my breath or write them down hidden on me to try and make things happen, only the most current stuff, what I think’ll be in the charts next week. I think it lets me see a bit ahead, because I’m trying to live in the future. That’s how I got you out of the clearing. I used “Should I Stay o
r Should I Go?” I was so afraid of you then.’

  I remembered when I’d seen her wiping off the Biro on her collar, ink on her fingers. I found my voice. ‘Did you . . . did you send me a . . . card?’

  She sighed. ‘I had to do something to make you stop hurting Elaine.’

  I closed my eyes. I couldn’t describe the ache I was feeling. I don’t think I registered feeling guilt, as such, until I was somewhere in my thirties, but I hope what I felt then was that.

  ‘I told you you were “too shy” to make you calm down. But I was angry and the lyric ended up having the power of a Number One single behind it, so I think it might have done a lot more.’

  I found that my mouth was open. Could that really be the reason I hadn’t come until she’d rubbed the lyric out on her collar? I was sure I believed in science, but there was also Waggoner, so why couldn’t there also be this?

  ‘I’m sorry about it being a Valentine’s card. I don’t want to get your hopes up, okay? I wanted Mum to see that I’d sent one to someone who wasn’t Anthony, and you’re quite safe.’

  I heard Waggoner, outside the door, make a muffled noise. Angie reacted to it with a frown. I didn’t want to hear anything more about the valentine now. ‘You said there was something weird about me–’

  ‘Sometimes I can half see it. Do you know what it is?’ I felt able to shake my head. ‘You weren’t Anthony’s friend, and then you were, and now you’re not again, but it wasn’t like how that normally works. It was all too fast, which is why I had a go at you about it, sorry. Do you know why that happened?’

  Again, I shook my head.

  ‘You seemed to change just before the school started changing.’ She ran a hand back through her hair. ‘God, if you’re going to think I’m mad, now’s the time!’

  ‘What do you think’s happening to the school?’

  ‘It’s changing into what someone else wants it to be. It was squares, and now it’s becoming circles. It was old already, but with us in it, it could be young, but now it’s getting older, and it wants us to be old. I think Lang being . . . killed – it feels so weird to say that – and Selway killing himself, two of Anthony’s friends, that’s got to have something to do with it too.’

  A terrible suspicion had formed in me. I pointed to the crack in the mirror. ‘Your note said that crack happened on Halloween night, after the school disco?’

  ‘Well, I came back here to find it cracked, so yeah, I guess.’

  I heard another noise from Waggoner, a growl. I closed my eyes, and Drake was inside the darkness. She couldn’t have been told what had happened to me. Not if the crack in the mirror was what she thought was important about that night. Could I tell her? I opened my eyes again. ‘Why are you going out with . . . him?’

  Angie paused, surprised by the sudden change of tack, a little disappointed in her safe boy. ‘I told you,’ she said. ‘Because of when he was born. The singles I sent you were a random casting of stuff from my records box. When I want to know what someone is like, I think hard about them, close my eyes, and pick their Top Ten at random.’

  I thought for a moment about ‘Goody Two Shoes’ and ‘Hungry Like the Wolf’ and the lyrics of ‘Cat People’ and the words I couldn’t hear in ‘Suspended in Gaffa’ I had felt that all the records were about me, but I sort of thought that was what pop music was about for everyone, that that was why I’d always denied myself it, because I didn’t deserve it.

  ‘But,’ she said, ‘if I want to go deeper, I check out the birth chart.’ She went to her bed, reached under it and produced a copy of a book called Top Twenty, compiled by Tony Jasper. She flicked to a page of tables for the year 1968. ‘His birthday is April 27th.’ I didn’t want to know, but she put the book in my hands. ‘Look.’

  I did. ‘Wonderful World’ by Louis Armstrong was at Number One.

  ‘So?’

  ‘So it took me a while to work this out, but the highest placing of a record is how much it influences you. The whole chart contributes, though. Sometimes it’s not about the title, but the lyrics, or the feeling of the music. When I started to think I should have a boyfriend, I found out the birthdays of everyone in our class, and I listened to all the records in the birth chart for each one.’ I wondered what the chart for August 17th, my birthday, was like. But then my gaze caught something else on the page, at number nineteen in the week Drake was born, a song by Jacky, ‘White Horses’. Was Drake destined to be part of what Waggoner was doing as much as I was? How much of this was already written? I hated the thought of it being already written.

  I closed the book. ‘So that’s why you’re with him? Because of Louis Armstrong?’

  ‘And “Lady Madonna”, and “If I Were A Carpenter” and “Can’t Keep My Eyes Off You”. And I thought maybe you’d understand.’

  I took a deep breath. I was on the edge of telling her. ‘Do you . . . know what he’s like?’

  ‘I know he’s too rough. Because he’s been terribly hurt. Have you seen what’s on his back?’

  ‘Where the horse kicked him?’

  ‘It’s a burn in the shape of an iron. I think his dad did it to him.’

  ‘But he says his dad–’

  ‘I’ve seen his dad hit him. Anthony tried to say it was a joke, but his dad meant it. Being hurt makes people bad. They can get past it, though.’

  Outside, Waggoner slammed his body into the wall, and the impact made my wound hurt and my teeth grind.

  ‘You were his mate for a bit; you must see there’s lots more to him. He’s also been hurt by what happened to his friends, but he’d never show it.’

  A great roar forced its way up out of my throat. ‘He hurt me!’

  ‘I know he’s done some awful things to you–’

  ‘He cut me.’ I gestured towards it.

  ‘What?’ She didn’t understand what I meant. ‘Show me.’

  I stared at her. I could hear Waggoner thumping on the door, like he was beating his head against it.

  She realised I wasn’t going to do anything. ‘Then we need to heal you too. Someone needs to. Someone needs to heal everybody. Before it’s too late. I know I can heal him–’

  I went quickly to the door. I didn’t want her to see I was on the verge of tears. I pushed my way past Waggoner. I was out of the house and walking towards home before he caught up. I found a phone box and called for Dad to pick me up. I said Angie was ill. Angie didn’t follow.

  * * *

  The next time I went to the library, I checked out my birth chart: ‘I Pretend’ by Des O’Connor, ‘Here Comes The Judge’ by Pigmeat Markham, and at Number One, The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, with ‘Fire’.

  Twenty-seven

  The next Number One was The Police with ‘Every Breath You Take’. I had started scanning the charts furiously. I was angry at Angie and comforted by the thought of her. I wrote a lot of stories about her.

  On the night before we were due to go back after the half-term break, Dad came into my room and said that he and my mother wanted to have a word with me. His tone was half serious and half mocking, as always. I sat down at the kitchen table with them, Waggoner beside me. ‘Now,’ Dad said, ‘we know you’ve kept saying that you want a skateboard–’

  I really hadn’t. They looked insanely dangerous.

  ‘You creased that page in the catalogue,’ said Mum. ‘I had to flatten it out again.’

  The Great Universal Catalogue. The skateboard page was opposite . . . Oh. The women coming out of the ocean, pulling off their snorkels. I quickly nodded.

  ‘So call it an incentive scheme,’ said Dad. ‘The mock exams start on July 11th. It’s your birthday in August. If you win the bursary, we’ll get you that skateboard and a helmet and set of pads to go with it.’

  It was an awkward smile, but at least I managed one.

  * * *

  On the Monday, I got through Woodwork, quietly planing away at something while Waggoner expertly chiseled the lines and swirls of the long, decorated pol
e he’d been working on. From the first day back, the weight had immediately dropped back onto everyone’s shoulders. The grass was dry, and the mud was dirt, and the tarmac sang with heat and the stone of the building shone. I kept my gaze away from Angie and kept walking, faster and faster, to try to stop Drake and Blewly and Rove from catching up with me. It didn’t work. They caught me every time.

  * * *

  On the Wednesday, in Physics, Mr. Brandswick was going over all the important formulae, for the pressure of a gas, for energy and time. He said there were only a dozen things to remember, and if we went over and over them before we went into the mocks, we’d be fine.

  * * *

  On the Thursday, Mr. Kent in Art slapped a newspaper in front of everyone and told them to rip it up and make papier-mâché. This was meaningless now, because this was nothing to do with the mocks. Mr. Kent said he was trying to keep his mind off the general election. That had closed John Bentley and a lot of other schools that day, because they had to be polling stations, but not ours. There was ripping. Then throwing of lumps of paper. Then spitting, then bowls of water getting knocked over. Mr. Kent went from place to place, faster and faster, trying to stop it.

  * * *

  On the Friday, it happened. That morning, Dad had looked at his newspaper and nodded, happy. ‘A landslide,’ he said to Mum. ‘That’ll show them.’

  I was walking with Waggoner in a straight line across the playing field at afternoon break. It was hot. We were walking towards a particular point at the corner of the tennis courts, out in the heat haze. Also walking for that point at that second were Blewly and Rove and Drake.

  They broke around us, and circled us, and we all ended up on the one spot. The other three started knocking into each other, hands in their pockets, shouldering each other like they were playing British Bulldog, not letting us out.

  Waggoner stuck his hands obstinately into his pockets and played back. He followed the rules. He ran at them. He shouldered into Blewly, sent him stumbling, ran after him, did so again. Blewly fell, rolled, got up. He tried to shoulder Waggoner back, but Waggoner was skipping sideways, dodging. Suddenly, he leapt forwards again, and Blewly fell again, winded. He made a high noise and crawled to his feet. He leapt at Waggoner, teeth bared, fists flying. He kicked up at Waggoner’s stomach, but Waggoner dodged again and pushed Blewly, his fists still randomly swinging, into Drake. A fist caught Drake in the mouth. Drake yelled, ‘Fuck,’ and went apeshit, pummeling. Blewly fell into Rove, blood spurting from his mouth. Rove yelled as it went all over his shirt. He lashed out, and Blewly fell.