Chalk

by Paul Cornell

  Kids were running in from everywhere now. I saw Louise walking purposefully towards us. Drake and Rove started to kick Blewly, seriously kick him. The first kid to arrive was Grayson from my bus. He started kicking at Blewly too. Kids rushed past me, faster and faster now, like I was in an avalanche. Surtees ran right into the middle of the knot that was getting bigger and bigger, and used his momentum to send his shoe right into the side of Blewly’s face. ‘See?’ he was screaming. ‘See?’

  I’d never seen a fight get so big. It was drawing in everyone, kids coming out of the forest, from behind the school buildings, running and yelling. Girls as well as boys. A girl fought her way to the front and leapt for Blewly’s face, trying to stamp down on his nose. I looked up to see Louise standing back, nodding, laughing. She seemed to be anticipating something. Now there were scuffles breaking out on the edges of the group. Surtees was lashing out at two kids beside him as they tried to pull him away. Some kids were treating this as British Bulldog, their hands in their pockets, arriving at a run, throwing themselves at the pile of bodies.

  Hands were starting to grab at me. I ducked under and wrestled away. Girls in the middle now, rolling about too, and then more boys, rolling on top of them. Blewly was somewhere under there. Kids reached down to grab or punch or scratch. They all wanted something of his. Everyone suddenly grabbing everyone else, round where Blewly was, the whole thing starting to swing, to totter, to spin on its axis.

  Blewly was rising up out of it. The anger. The anger. He was bloody about the face, and the red went right down into his skin. His mouth was open and bellowing, and on each arm he was heaving a mass of kids who were trying to hold him down and wrestle him back onto the ground. The kicks and spittle flew at him harder and harder, and the nails of girls ripped into his cheeks. But still he rose up and up. He wanted to take them all with him.

  Now there were screams coming from the mass, and the sun was being blotted out by dark clouds overhead, that were rushing in, in impossible time. Somewhere I could hear the voice of Angie, shouting, shouting, trying to put some words into the way of this. I heard another female voice, a mocking one, questioning her, saying she was mad, getting her own words in the way.

  A gap bloomed in the middle of the crowd. Blewly looked up. He was suddenly free, but terribly afraid. He’d never looked so alone.

  There was the loudest noise I ever heard. Overhead and round me. The light flashed all around at once. Our shadows lay in every direction in that moment, including all the impossible ones.

  But my eyes were open.

  Waggoner had kicked up into Blewly’s throat.

  Blewly’s head had flown back. Frozen in time. In the light that made everything white. It had flown back at too great an angle. He could not live with his head there.

  The flash let go for a moment. Then came again. A gap of darkness in between.

  Now Blewly’s head had left his shoulders completely. Blood jetting. The look on his face, of something so unfairly taken from him.

  I fell with it in front of me as the sound shot past and then back. I looked into his face. He blinked. What he was never quite left his face. It just went further and further and further away as the echoes died, and so it stayed there, just the last bit of it, trapped in that spot.

  His body exploded into ashes, and the head with it. Concussion and light. White. Too loud to hear.

  Everyone was falling with me. The rain started to blaze down around us. Now there was a patch of shining water, no, black glass, and in a moment the glass would be lost under the water that was pooling around us, cooling our bodies, the steam rising off us, that made us stand and stumble and slide and slip and start to yell and cry out and justify. Louise was sitting, her palms on the ground, her eyes closed, heaving in deep breaths through her nose. Angie was sobbing, a hand over her mouth, staring.

  Teachers were amongst us now. Mrs. Parkin. The lightning! The lightning!

  There was Blewly’s head, one lump amongst all the other lumps of him, fried and lying beside the fused black glass of the grass, his body distributed and his self never given back, locked to that spot forever.

  Twenty-eight

  The school was shut down. So many hospitalisations. So few actual injuries from the lightning. Cuts and bruises and compression injuries. I was unscathed, of course. Nobody else had seen his head go flying. Everyone blamed the lightning.

  Mr. Clare the bursar had called the parents and asked them to pick up their children. We hadn’t seen Mr. Rove. I had lain there shaking, staring up at the school buildings. It was all seriously different now. There was a green shine across everything, like an echo of the lightning. The car park had police cars and fire engines in it.

  Dad was silent in the car going home. He hadn’t approached Mr. Clare, just waved from by the gate, and I’d finally seen him and scuttled over without telling anyone I’d gone. ‘Not your fault, then?’ he said finally, ironically. He pulled the car off the road at the Quemerford post office. ‘I think you could do with an ice cream,’ he said.

  So I had a Lolly Gobble Choc Bomb. That had a core of a chocolate bar, which wasn’t like any other chocolate, under a layer of ice cream, under a layer of chocolate with hundreds and thousands on the top.

  The way Blewly’s head had bounced. I’d seen what was inside the bottom of someone’s neck. It hadn’t looked real. The smell of burnt meat. What I wanted had summoned that. It was too big. It was too big.

  I let Mum dry me off. She thundered the towel over my hair.

  * * *

  I tried in that week to start revising again, but the information bounced off me. I felt my thoughts go to what was too big and then fall away again, and that feeling of falling away ended up as an ache in my stomach, and I thought of other things. Would I get my stuff back from Blewly’s family now? Could I ask? How could I ask? I shouldn’t be thinking that. What would Angie be thinking? Her boy had lost another close friend. She must be planning something, trying to work out something. Dad would come in more often than he had before, and look at where I was curled up, reading or writing.

  I listened to Radio One. I hoped David Bowie’s new hit, ‘China Girl’, would get to Number One, because while its meanings would be complicated for Angie, its tone was comforting. She hadn’t tried to talk to me since I’d run from her. She must have been wondering if I would tell other kids about how weird she was. She must have kept waiting for some sign of that. I liked having power over her, but ever since Elaine, that had bad feelings mixed up with it. I didn’t like to think of Angie feeling as desperate as I was. I wanted not to hate her for her wanting to heal Drake. I felt a complicated sort of anger and care about her at the same time. Both feelings made me hard. I kept saying to myself that she wanted to heal me too. What kept getting in the way was that it didn’t feel like there was room for her to do both. I ground my teeth at the thought of her and Drake, at the thought of Drake.

  Waggoner just kept looking at me and sighing. He shook his head whenever I thought about her. ‘You have to keep going,’ he said.

  For the first time, I tried to write just the truth, but I couldn’t get to it. I finished the story, and realised that some of it wasn’t true. For the first time, I threw away that version, burnt it on the stove late at night, washed the scraps away down the sink. The second time I wrote it, I knew, even as I wrote, that some of the stuff that was true sounded like I’d made it up, that it wouldn’t be accepted. So I did the same with that. The third time I stuck to what was true, except that I didn’t include anything impossible. I wrote about what it was like on the playing field. How there were no teachers. How anything could happen. How anything had been happening for a long time now. I mentioned the lightning because there would be the patch of black glass on the ground, there would be evidence. Even if there wasn’t, that sounded like it could happen. I wrote about how things really were between me and Drake and Rove and Blewly, though I didn’t say why, but I gave them, and Louise, false names. I didn’t ment
ion Angie.

  * * *

  On Monday, June 20th, we went back to school. There was no special assembly about Blewly. There was no connection made between the murder, the suicide and the act of God. I hated that term. An act of God working for what I’d wanted, what I still wanted, despite everything, every time I thought of Drake. Getting off the bus felt like walking uphill. The green shine persisted, blaring against the green of summer. There was no corridor now that remained straight; they all curved so you couldn’t see what was at the end. The sound dropped off between classrooms. Winds moved through the building in ways that shouldn’t have worked. I saw Louise standing at the junctions of corridors, her dress flapping, enjoying the new breeze. In the days to follow, I saw her, every other break time, walking far out on the boundaries of the playing fields. I went to look sometimes, and found pieces of glass or coins. She was changing the school in many small ways: swirls of mud she’d made that had been baked hard; quick little three-stroke carvings on fence posts; paintings too high to reach that now hung at awkward angles.

  There had been a meeting of parents and teachers. Dad came home from it saying, ‘Well, that was a waste of time.’ We thought the mock exams might have been called off. But they weren’t. Nobody said anything about that. The bursary depended on the results of the mocks.

  How was Drake feeling? He and Rove walked together, and it was just the two of them now, but they were still attacking randomly, still the same.

  At first break on that first day back, everyone went over to see if the patch of black glass was there, if there was still any blood. The area around the patch was surrounded by four sticks, and police tape and some blue plastic sheeting covered the ground. It stayed that way until the end of the school year. I looked at that plastic sheet and I saw a patch of a different sky, waiting to be born.

  * * *

  On June 28th, Rod Stewart went to Number One with ‘Baby Jane’. Optimism, he asserts, is his best defence. The mock exams would start on Monday, July 11th.

  July 11th: History.

  July 12th: R.E.

  July 13th: Physics.

  July 14th: Maths.

  July 15th: Biology.

  July 18th: English Lit and Chemistry.

  July 19th: Geography.

  July 20th: English Language.

  July 21st: French.

  * * *

  I woke up on that first morning, and I hadn’t revised. Not recently. Not enough. We went into the dining hall, which was filled with evenly spaced desks, and echoed like we’d never heard it echo. Waggoner hadn’t come with me. What could he do in an exam? I was astonished to be here. I wanted to wake up now and find that I’d revised after all.

  On the way in, Angie smiled at me. She was on her way to try for her bursary. I thought about it for a moment and smiled back. There was also that line in the Number One saying the narrator ‘knew secrets about’ the subject of the song, but the tone was conciliatory. She would know by now that I hadn’t told anyone about her. It was like she was half of something that could save me. She was facing the same thing I was now. I wanted to talk to her again, to be in her room again, to hear secrets again, but I didn’t know how to start getting there. She would have to ask me.

  This History paper was mostly concerned with the Corn Laws. I started to write at high speed. I wrote what I thought had really happened. I had to ask for more paper. I did it a bit too loudly. I brought my last page to a screeching halt when Mr. Coxwell said to stop now, and I stabbed the ballpoint into the inkwell that still sat meaninglessly in the top corner of the desk and I looked at the rest of the kids in the room with a tension grimace at having to stop.

  In the RE exam, the questions were historical ones, like Saul’s conversion on the road to Damascus. I wrote about taking an eye for an eye.

  In Physics, I wrote about how two big things rubbing against each other could produce lightning between them.

  I did the paper in Maths, but got lost, my equations all over the page.

  For Biology, I wrote about smoking will kill you.

  In English Lit, I wrote what, judging by the mark I was given, was regarded as a reasonable piece about Hamlet’s reluctance to act, but which at the time I thought was me taking the piss.

  Chemistry was about turning grass into glass and nothing more.

  Just before I went in to the Geography exam, I heard that Paul Young had got to Number One with ‘Wherever I Lay my Hat, That’s my Home’. I’d been distantly hoping for that: all those lines about the narrator’s worthlessness as a boyfriend.

  Geography was about how everything around us is just what glaciers did to what was underneath them.

  For English Language, I was invited to write an essay. I continued the series of stories I’d been writing about Angie’s adventures with the power of pop music. I called her Rosamund.

  For French, I just made up all sorts of words.

  On the way home from school after the last of the mock exams, Dad asked me if I wanted another ice cream. I told him I didn’t.

  * * *

  That night, I put my headphones on and spun the dial on the radiogram to AM, to hear strange, distant channels in French, and something that sounded like Russian and then the surging, pounding beat that was meant to be something to do with radar tracking submarines, and nuclear missiles waiting to be fired. I was calm, listening to its regular electronic pounding. Although it was what lay under everything, it sounded like science fiction. I knew now that the end of the world was coming not from the future, but the past.

  Twenty-nine

  The next day was the last day of term. It was going to be one of those days when there were no real lessons. Mum and Dad hadn’t asked how I’d done in the mocks. They’d looked at me questioningly, frightened, every evening when I’d got home. At first, I’d made myself look hopeful. Then I realised I was getting their hopes up, and so I started to look sullen. Mr. Land, in what was supposed to be History, handed out a list to each desk instead. ‘A treasure hunt,’ he said. ‘A bag of sweets for the winner.’ The list said:

  An item of sporting equipment.

  Something Irish.

  Something of great value.

  A book with a bird in the title.

  Something good to eat.

  As many individual things as possible that can be held in one hand.

  Something with a Latin motto on it, and its translation.

  Something of scientific interest.

  A picture of a famous person whom your teacher will recognise.

  An apple for the teacher.

  Mr. Land told the class that we had one hour to find all these things. He stopped me as the others ran out. ‘How are things working out,’ he asked, ‘since we had that chat? I haven’t noticed you giving anyone a jolly good thump.’

  ‘No, sir,’ I said.

  Waggoner and I walked the curving corridors of the school, and went in all the rooms, and nowhere was locked. We heard distant music from a record player in the staff room. It wasn’t like Angie’s music. It felt like everyone was hiding, on this day that was halfway between two things. Waggoner and I walked through all the old and important things that had been left here and made into a school: the paintings of people we didn’t know; the architecture that was for the use of someone else. I didn’t feel the need to do anything about the list of objects. I didn’t want to do anything. Something was coming, and I wanted it to, to make things end. I was empty, released from worry, because that ending was coming. I felt I deserved it, in a good way and in a bad way.

  We encountered Louise, standing on a balcony, looking down into the hall. She had in her hand a painting she’d made in Art. I looked over Waggoner’s shoulder as he inspected it. It was an intricate map of the school and its surroundings: two lines where every one should be, swirls with suns and ripples. The school buildings were rounded. There were tiny stars in a lot of the rooms. One of them, up in the roof, had a big red circle in it that radiated out, swirls from it flo
wing into all the other rooms. The doors looked like breathing, sucking orifices, or the layers of geological diagrams. The big tree outside was a spike which generated, like a map of currents, circles and spirals of its own, all around. The lines of the horse were still visible on the football pitch, its eye marked with bright red. There was a black spot closer to the school, and that, like the eye, had swirls that swept right off the edge of the map, including the bright yellow of lightning. Among the green of the forest, there was a circle with a lot of influence too, a ring that I had a terrible feeling was meant to be my clearing, Drake’s clearing, the clearing where I had had something cut from me. Furthest away of all, on the edge of the paper, there was a green circle, surrounded by three upon three lines of current, which stretched all the way back to the school. ‘What’s that?’ I said, putting my finger on it and feeling that the paper had been pushed up in a little dome where I touched it.

  Louise ignored me. She spoke only to Waggoner, saw only Waggoner. He looked at me and relented. ‘The barrow,’ he said. ‘Chippenham hospital.’ Before I could ask anything else, Louise said there was chalk in every room now, that the territory nearly matched the map. The two of them talked like old friends, like people in a TV show who knew a lot more than they were telling. She took a packet of coloured chalks from her pocket. She was going to do some more drawing, ready for next year.