by Paul Cornell
She hadn’t won the bursary— she had come second to Netty—but that seemed to have pleased her mum and dad enough. It had convinced them she was reasonably normal. Except now there would be this.
Her mum called that there was someone here to see her. It was one of Angie’s friends. Angie put the stories carefully away in her hiding place and went down to see. ‘Louise,’ she said.
‘Hi,’ said Louise, as if nothing had happened.
* * *
They had coffee in Angie’s room. Louise didn’t make much effort to resurrect a dead friendship, as Angie thought she might be here to do. She talked in her usual brittle way about what she’d been up to that summer, but at least she didn’t dig in with sharp questions. Angie hadn’t talked to Netty or Jenn about Andrew, or about Anthony. Nobody else knew what had happened. Now she felt a terrible urge to talk to Louise about both of them, but she stopped herself.
* * *
Louise knew that Angie kept all that she didn’t want her mum to see under her bed. When Angie went out of the room to get some more coffee, Louise reached under and found the stories, still bound in a ribbon that had been tied and untied many times. It wasn’t what she had been looking for, but after a moment Louise realised that it would do. She put the stories in her bag, and when Angie came back in, she talked to her emptily for another hour and then said it was time she was going. She paused at the door. ‘Don’t think we’re going to be friends again,’ she said. ‘You’re getting everything so wrong, you could send everybody in the wrong direction. So you’re about to find out what distraction really means.’
Angie cried out and damn near threw Louise down the stairs, until her mum, screaming in social horror, stopped her.
* * *
On Monday, everyone went back to school. Sometime during that day, Louise made her way to the old chimney near the art room. She took the bundle of stories from her bag, shoved her arm up the chimney, and found a place for the papers to lodge. She slammed them home and fixed them to the lining.
* * *
At that exact moment, Angie, sitting in a toilet cubicle, cried out and put a hand to her mouth and looked at what she’d bought that morning. All the hope she’d had of this place and time not being her life forever, of escaping into the future, had gone.
Thirty-three
When we went back to school in September, there were visibly fewer kids there. A couple of the more well-off families had had enough. The buildings were full of circles, of green, of the coloured chalk spirals, so much so they hurt to look at. The light and the smell were different. Kids kept falling on those stairs, like there was slippery moss under their feet. The weirdness wasn’t growing. It was waiting. There was still no sign of Waggoner. I had expected him to be here. This was where his mission was; the buildings were shaped and ready for him. I didn’t know how I felt about that any more. If I didn’t see Waggoner again, if he never completed his task . . . No, I still couldn’t bring myself to think that would be okay.
It was announced at the first assembly that Fiesta and Netty had won the bursaries. Mr. Coxwell, making the announcement, called Fiesta by his real name. Fiesta shrugged as everyone looked at him. That shrug had got him through a lot.
I kept looking across at Angie. I wanted her to know that I was looking to her, to see if she was okay when Drake was about, to support her. I also desperately wanted to know if she and Drake were still together. I didn’t see them together, but that was how things had always been. She didn’t look back at me. I went home sitting in the back of the minibus, staring out at the trees again, wondering if the horrors of my cock could really have taken that long to sink in.
* * *
That Wednesday, Elaine walked right up to me and said, ‘You loved her, romantically and purely!’ She ran away before I could ask what she was talking about.
‘By the power of Bananarama!’ yelled Franklin’s sister later that day, flinging her hands into the air like a magician.
As I went round the playground with my lot, everybody was laughing. The boys had heard from the girls. ‘Are you a king?’ Surtees said. ‘Have you snogged her? Have you shagged her in your corpse?’ He meant my copse, but I couldn’t reply to correct him.
* * *
By the Thursday, everywhere I walked, kids pointed and laughed.
I couldn’t look at Angie without anger warping the shape of my vision. She’d told! She marched proudly along, her expression calm.
The bus every day became joke after joke. Elaine led it. She deserved to. I was silent. I looked at the telephone at home. I didn’t want to look at the telephone. I couldn’t write stories. I would never write stories again. It felt like I’d betrayed myself, that something vital had fallen out of me into those pages and would never be mine again. I found it hard to pick up a pen, then had to pick up a pen in school, many times a day, so I did. No music. Except Dad would put Radio 1 on in the car now, and so I heard ‘Red Red Wine’ all the time.
I lost the desire to come, because that had got wrapped up with her too. It must be diseased. It would fall off me now. I would be nothing. That would be better.
At one point, the phone rang, and I picked it up. It was her voice, but she sounded so angry. She started accusing me of all the things she was doing to me. I put the phone down and left it off the hook until Mum saw it like that and put it back. Angie didn’t call again.
* * *
One day at first break, I saw Angie talking with Drake. She was being serious with him. He had a faltering look on his face. He actually had an expression.
That same break, he suddenly came for me. He hit my nose so hard that I fell back onto the gravel. I lurched, groggy, blood going everywhere. I could hear cheering and clapping, kids talking about kings and queens and copses. ‘You thought you could get your hands on her. Show her your cock, did you? Could she even see what’s left? Fucking cunt.’ He kicked me hard in the ribs. I curled up around it.
Rove spat on my blazer, and they walked away.
* * *
Late that night, after Mum and Dad had gone to sleep, I found the box Angie had given me. I had considered throwing it away, but that would have meant seeing it again. I took the box into the lounge, where the television was on, me waiting for The Outer Limits. In one of the drafts of one of my later stories I say I opened the box.
* * *
Inside was something small, brown, curled up in cotton wool. It looked like an ancient leaf. There was no dirt on it. It seemed perfect. Washed. Dried off. Tended to. It was the part of me that had been cut off.
‘I knew something had been hurt,’ she said. ‘Because of “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me”. “Let me love and steal.” That was my first clue. So I knew I had to look after it. I found it in the clearing just before Anthony arrived.’
* * *
I did open the box. There was nothing inside.
Waggoner wandered back into the room. ‘Shall I just get on with it, then?’ he said.
There was nothing left to decide now. ‘It’s just going to take until Halloween, isn’t yet?’
‘Yes. Not long to wait.’
‘And all the stuff you want to happen as well–?’
‘That’s when everything goes back to how it should be.’
* * *
All I heard from other kids at school now was about Angie and me that summer, especially the impossible stuff: the magic on the downs and in pop music. It felt as if, like Fiesta’s nickname, soon the teachers would start to refer to it too. ‘Now,’ Mr. Brandswick would say, puffing on his cigarette, ‘we’re going to do wave motion, just like Waggoner says Angie held back the waves by singing “The Tide is High” so she and Waggoner here could talk a bit longer on the dock.’
* * *
Our form teacher Mrs. Mills once told us, when she’d got really angry at Lang for sniggering, about how history was a natural progression towards collective ownership and the abolition of capital. That when two big ideas hit each other head on,
the result was called a synthesis, a new idea, and that this process of things hitting each other was how the momentum of the universe towards those ends came about. Lang sniggering stood in the way of that process.
One Wednesday morning in winter, when all the other buses had been late because of the frost, and for the first five minutes it had been just me and her in the form room, I had put my hand up, and she had said to put it down and asked what I wanted.
‘What did you mean? About the two forces?’
She came over and sat down beside me, which was scary. ‘It’s a bit old for you. I was talking about natural economic forces.’
‘Natural economic forces that make history?’
‘You could say that.’
‘Would people be able to see them?’
‘You see it all the time. Like when the Harris’ factory closed down.’
‘I mean, would they see the actual forces?’
‘No. Okay, it’s like–’
‘So it’s not seeing one thing over another? Like a montage?’ I’d seen a documentary about Top of the Pops a few years ago. Cameramen had explained how what one camera saw could be mixed in with another. ‘Like there’s a competition for what’s the most true. When one thesis, one picture, is stronger than the other, that’s what ends up being true.’
She had laughed. ‘I think that’s something you saw on Doctor Who. That’s not the way the real world works.’
I was reminded of that conversation a lot as kids kept asserting to me that these two different and opposed sets of impossible things I’d talked about in my stories–the magic of the downs and the magic of pop music–were impossible and yet also had happened to me. ‘Is that what happened with the horse on the football pitch?’ said Rove. ‘Did Bananarama want Mr. Rushden’s eyeball? Or was it the things on the downs?’
The questions got stranger. They began to ask about Lang’s accidents and death in hospital, about Selway killing himself, about the lightning and the glass in the ground, always in that tone of voice, like it was all a joke, but the answers were important to them too. Waggoner walked beside me again now. So I wasn’t saying no to everything they said. I started to say yes.
* * *
Mr. Rove had decided to sit at the side of the stage as Mr. Coxwell led every assembly now. He nodded along, but kept nodding after Mr. Coxwell had finished talking.
That dry cold of early autumn. The fogs in the morning. The blankness. The trees changing colour, just starting to shed leaves. Everything was going to come around again, but there would come a point where things would stop. I desperately wanted that. Wanting that was all I had left. The school had become permanently rounded and green and hard and old. There was going to be an end, and in that end, I would be healed.
* * *
One Tuesday in late September, I saw Angie and her friends listening to the radio at lunchtime. I saw the look of horror on Angie’s face. I was glad she was horrified. Culture Club were at Number One again, for the first time since last Halloween. I was sure they would stay there until the next Halloween disco. The song was about how everything comes around again. It was the sound of something coming to get her, and I was glad. The title of the track was ‘Karma Chameleon’.
Thirty-four
Waggoner wanted me to call Angie, to ask her for the Cup back. I hadn’t thought about her still having it, but I supposed she did. I didn’t know why she would keep it, if our time together had meant so little, but I wouldn’t call her.
I forced myself to buy a copy of Smash Hits! and read the lyrics to ‘Karma Chameleon’. They would have filled Angie with fear about the future. Good.
In Art that week, Mr. Kent told Louise that her wild new paintings were the best he’d seen. The kids who were copying her, and that was almost all of them now, had now forgotten they were doing that; it was just what you did in Astand up for myselfrt. Her most recent paintings were of faces that might be monsters. Some of them had similarities to kids and teachers. The chalk she’d used to draw lines and swirls along the walls had mostly vanished now, but you could feel where it had been. The rooms retained the colour of the chalk in the colour of their light. Everything contributed to the curved and lofty feeling. Out on the playing fields, I walked past the heavy grass roller, and was surprised to look through the handle and catch a line between it, the sun through a cleft in the hill, the white boundary of the football pitch, the school. There were all sorts of alignments like that. It was like we were in a huge clock, and everything was slowly swinging into place. You could see new carvings in desks, chalk lines round the boundaries of every blackboard, which reappeared within the day if I rubbed out just an inch with my finger, groupings of paint pots and erasers that swarmed precisely in store cupboards, even where nobody would see, that changed every time I looked. I kept looking. I wanted to know. I knew when it would all be complete, but I didn’t know exactly what. The hardened sand in the long jump pit had been made into ripples. They spilled over the square enclosure, and made it round. They were like banks and ditches seen from the air. It all scared me, but in a good way. Rove and Drake himself remained to be punished, and I wanted that, coldly, solidly, right at the heart of who I was now. I wanted to hurt Angie for what she had done to me. But I would not. I would settle for the justice of the revenge I had originally called for.
* * *
On Friday, the last day of September, Drake made me eat soil while Rove held my nose. ‘This is for Angie,’ Drake kept saying, over and over. It was like he was trying to force something into himself as he forced it into me. I thought he might literally be doing it for her, that she’d asked him to do it. I had shown her my cock. This was what I’d gotten for trusting someone with that sight, for imagining the world could care about my wound.
Waggoner went behind Drake and Rove, reached into Drake’s bag, took something and closed the bag again before Drake saw.
I thought of the school and grounds being swept away, with everyone inside them, replaced by the sunny hills and lovely rolling roundness and protection from the wind, protection from everything. I thought of sitting above it all and looking down at the world and judging everyone.
* * *
The next day, Dad came into my bedroom, and saw that I was sitting against the bed, not doing anything, waiting for Monday. Waggoner sat beside me.
‘You’ve been quiet,’ he said. ‘Aren’t you writing stories?’
I said no. He led me into the lounge, saying he wanted to show me something. It was a faded cardboard folder, and in it were ten typed sheets of very thin, almost transparent paper, browned by age and cigarette smoke. I held the first one by its top corner, and I could see right through it. ‘This is my book. The book I never finished,’ he said.
The title at the top of that first page was The Journal of Frank Waggoner: The War in the East.
‘I was sent with my mates on a troop ship which spent six weeks at sea, going to Burma to fight the filthy Japs,’ it began. I read the rest of it while he sat there. It told, in almost no detail, at a huge distance, about how Dad had caught malaria the moment he landed. Then he was sent into the jungle, and spent every night awake, fearing for the lives of himself and his friends. He’d never heard the sounds of a jungle before. Things came in and out of the trees, into the camp, all the time. He tried to ignore them when he wasn’t on guard, but then one of them turned out to be a Japanese soldier, naked and covered in grease, with a dagger in his teeth, and Dad stopped making a dividing line in his thoughts between when he was on guard and when he wasn’t. The man got shot by Dad’s bunk, and he had to spend the next morning wiping it all down. He was a private, and he was promoted four times, and demoted four times. When he didn’t respond to a sergeant who wanted him to dig a ditch, the sergeant yelled about the number of stripes he had, and Dad replied that altogether, he’d had more. The funny stories were put in order, in separate paragraphs, like Dad had wanted to type them out first and quickly. Then there was a gap, and a paragraph abo
ut a Japanese charge. The angry words came thundering onto the page, without commas. How crazy and high on drugs were the Japs to do this, waving swords? Dad saw a friend of his get a sword blade through his throat. Then the officer with the sword was cut down, and they fell over together, and Dad’s friend’s head fell off. On leave, Dad and his friends drank a lot, and one of his friends broke a rifle out of base stores and somehow got shot. There was a tirade of abuse about the stinking coolies who followed them around, trying to sell them things. Dad played a joke on one, setting his shirt on fire. There was another gap, and then a paragraph about the joy of getting home on the ship, and the anger at the docks when nobody seemed to know if they were finished or not, if they could get onto the trains and be sent home.
‘I didn’t want to go home,’ Dad said, when he saw where I’d got to. ‘Stupid. I hung around the station. In the end, I just decided not to be so daft. I didn’t write that there.’
After he’d got home, Dad signed up with the Prudential insurance company, and started selling policies door-to-door. ‘Utopia, we expected. Just relief and peace. Only something else always comes along.’ One day, the Lord of the Manor, a Lansdowne, a Petty-Fitzmaurice, rode past him on this turning where our house was. Dad was in his first car. His Lordship yelled for Dad to doff his cap. Dad stopped his car, ran up to him so fast the horse shied away and yelled back he’d do no such thing. His Lordship was so afraid he galloped off. ‘The look on his face. The world was changing.’