by John Metcalf
He surveyed the silent line.
“Start with the little things, you see, Mr. Forde, because little things lead to big things. That’s something that in the Service you quickly learn. And talking of little things,” he bellowed suddenly, his face empurpled, “what are you trying to hide? Stand up STRAIGHT!”
Half-turning to Rob, he said from the side of his mouth,
“A rotten apple if ever I saw one. Attempted rape, got off with interference.”
In spite of all the showering, there was a close smell of sweat, feet, sourness.
Uncle Arthur’s keys clinked in the awful silence. He selected one and the Captain of Churchill stepped out of line to receive it. The boy unlocked a metal cupboard and took out a square ten-pound tin and an aluminium dessert spoon.
Upon command, the boys began to file past holding out a cupped hand and Uncle Arthur spooned into it grey tooth-powder.
“Better than paste,” he confided. “What’s paste but powder with the water added?”
The boys were crowding round the racks of tagged toothbrushes, bunching round the six long sinks, dribbling water onto the powder, working it up with the brushes to make paste in their palms.
“What about the others?” Rob said. “The other boys?”
“They’ll be at their healthy exercises in the yard with Mr. Austyn. Stuart House and Lancaster tonight. Anyone who goes on report, any infraction, you see, the whole House suffers. Gingers them all up. Doesn’t make the offenders popular, that of course being the point. Discourages them as likes to think of themselves as hard cases.”
A scuffle was starting around the last sink. The sounds of hawking, gargling, gobbing, were becoming melodramatic.
“Right! Let’s have you!” bellowed Uncle Arthur. “Lather yourselves all over, paying special attention to all crevices—and no skylarking!”
He turned on the showers and the dank concrete cavern filled with steam. The pale figures slowly became ghostly, indistinct. Conversation was impossible against the roar of the water.
When the showers were turned off, the boys dried themselves, fixed the soggy, threadbare towels round their waists, gathered up their clothes, and formed a single line facing the far door. Uncle Arthur unlocked it and the line shuffled closer together. The first boy stopped in front of them, stuck his head forward, contorted his features into a mocking grimace. Rob stared at him in amazement, fearing for him. Uncle Arthur inspected the exposed teeth and nodded. Face after snarling face, eyes narrowed or staring, flesh-stretched masks, until the last white towel was starting up the stairs.
“Here’s a tip for you just in passing,” said Uncle Arthur as he double-locked the door and they followed them up, “a wrinkle, as you might say, that they wouldn’t have taught you at the university. Tomorrow, in morning showers, keep your eyes skinned for any lad as has a tattoo. Right? Then you have a read of his file. Right? Files? Where? Just touch up Doc Aubrey. So any young offender, as they’re now called, any young offender ’as as got a tattoo, you be on the qui vive because sure as the sun shines you’ve got trouble on your hands. Right?”
Rob nodded.
“Most particularly,” said Uncle Arthur, stopped, puffed by the stairs, “if it says ‘Mum’ or ‘Mother.’”
There were forty beds in the dormitory, twenty on each side of the room. On each bed was a single grey blanket. Hanging from the end of each iron-frame bed was a grey cloth drawstring bag. Some of the beds were empty. The boys, now in grey pyjamas, stood at attention at the foot of the beds.
Uncle Arthur surveyed the two silent rows, walked down the lines as if inspecting an honour guard.
Eventually nodded.
The boys opened the cloth bags, taking out rolled bundles of Beano and Dandy, Hotspur, Champion, and The Wizard.
“Providing there’s no undue noise,” said Uncle Arthur, “comics till nine.”
*
Rob’s own room was featureless. His suitcase had been delivered from the Lodge and stood beside the iron-frame bed. On the bed were two grey blankets. A red printed notice on the inside of the door said: Keep This Door Locked At All Times. Green floral-printed curtains, lilacs, covered the window. He drew one of the curtains aside to look out but there wasn’t a window there at all, just the ochre painted wall.
He hung up his clothes in the varnished plywood wardrobe, put shirts onto jangling metal hangers. He stacked underwear and socks in the chest of drawers. Set his travelling alarm-clock for six-thirty and put it on the floor near the door so that he would be forced to get up to turn if off. Stowed the suitcase under the bed.
He found himself wondering if the serials he’d read as a child were still running in the comics, the adventures of Rockfist Rogan, the exploits of Wilson the Amazing Athlete. Was it Hotspur or The Wizard? He could feel their coarse paper, smell the wonderful smell of the print. He found himself wondering if the Wolf of Kabul, with his lethal cricket bat bound in brass wire, was still haunting the Frontier.
Standing in the fluorescent light of the bathroom, insane-asylum light, the light in the white basement where they conducted the experiments, he stared at himself in the mirror.
The Wolf of Kabul—it was flooding suddenly back—the Wolf had called the cricket bat clickee-baa.
The toilet paper was in a box, stacked harsh sheets, each sheet printed with the Broad Arrow and across it diagonally the words:
Not For Retail Distribution.
*
When he entered the Staff Dining Room in the morning with his tray, one of the two men at the end of the central refectory table called,
“Do come and join us! Austyn. With a ‘Y.’ Sports and Geography.”
He was tall and boyish, dressed in a white shirt and cricket flannels.
“My name’s Forde,” said Rob, shaking the outstretched hand, “and I’m supposed to be teaching English.”
“And my surly colleague,” said Mr. Austyn, “is Mr. Brotherton. Woodwork. Not an early bird, Mr. Brotherton.”
Rob nodded.
“You’re a university man, I understand?” said Mr. Austyn as Rob unloaded his tray. Something of a rara avis in Approved School circles.”
“Just a novice,” said Rob.
“I, myself,” said Mr. Austyn, “attended Training College. Dewhurst. In Surrey.”
Mr. Brotherton raised one ham off his chair and farted.
“Well, look,” said Mr. Austyn, rising, draining his cup, consulting his watch in military manner, “time marches on. I’d better be getting my lads organized. I’ll look forward to talking later. Actually,” he added, “we’ll need to foregather for an info session because, as you may have been informed, I administer, for my sins, the Biscuit Fund.”
Rob watched as he walked out. He was wearing plimsolls of a dazzling whiteness. He walked on his toes and seemed almost to bounce.
Mr. Brotherton explored his nostrils for long, introspective seconds and then started to split a matchstick with his horny thumbnail.
Rob drank Nescafé. Mr. Brotherton picked his teeth with the matchstick.
“‘I attended Training College’!” he said.
“Pardon?”
“I’ve ‘attended’ a symphony concert at the Albert Hall,” said Mr. Brotherton, “but it doesn’t mean I played first fucking fiddle.”
“Quite,” said Rob.
“You wouldn’t likely think it,” he said, getting to his feet and dropping the crumpled paper serviette on the table, “but I was once a cabinetmaker.”
*
The classroom was less than a quarter the size of a normal classroom and the twenty-three boys were jammed along the benches. There was somewhere, Uncle Arthur believed, a set of readers. Rob issued each boy with a sheet of paper and pencil, and, as he had been instructed by Uncle Arthur, wrote on the blackboard:
When I grow up, I want to—<
br />
These papers were to be read by Dr. Aubrey, described by Uncle Arthur with a wink and a finger tap to the side of his nose as “the old trick cyclist.”
Rob watched the boys writing, watched the way the pencils were gripped or clasped. He curbed the use of the wall-mounted pencil sharpener after a couple of boys had reduced new pencils to one-inch stubs. He denied nine requests to go to the lavatory. At the end of the allotted time, he collected and counted the pencils and glanced through what Uncle Arthur had called the “Completions.”
They were brief, written in large, wayward scripts, and violent in spelling. Some of the papers were scored almost though.
*
Files in his arms, with an elbow Rob depressed the Staff Room door handle and backed in.
“‘Evening,” he said, “I’m—”
“Arson!” said the man in an armchair, feet up on the coffee table. He closed the ring-binder and chucked it on the floor. “A little show of spirit, don’t you think? A certain assertion in the face of…”
His languid hand took in the unwashed mugs, the ochre walls, the Portrait of the Queen, the sock.
“I’m Robert—”
“Forde,” said the man. “I’ve read your file. Timothy Audrey,” he said, not getting up. “As we’re cellmates, banged-up together, as it were, shall we be Bob and Tim?”
“So you’re the Doc! I was about to read some of your files.”
“You’d be better employed,” he said in a deliberate and weary tone, “pulling your pud.”
To mask his surprise, Rob dumped the files and the Completions on the coffee table and straightened them.
“Actually,” he said, “most people call me Rob.”
“Arson,” said Tim again. “Cheers me up, a spot of arson…as would almost any sign of initiative…”
Timothy Aubrey looked, Rob thought, like one of those schoolboy cricket heroes depicted on the covers of boys’ books from the twenties and thirties—tall, lean, mop of fair hair, blue eyes, his stance at the crease expressing an elegant but manly power, the sort of boy who grew into being debonair.
Rollwright of the Upper Sixth
“Are you actually a Doc? If you don’t mind my saying so, you look a little young—”
“I have a B.A. in psychology,” said Tim, “from Hull. One of our more dispiriting seats of learning.”
“Uncle Arthur,” said Rob, “refers to you as ‘the old trick cyclist.’”
Tim shrugged.
“The point is, whatever his jocularities, he’s still uneasy, a bit leery, unsettled. He hasn’t decided yet what his move’ll be. It’s because of the files.”
“These?”
“No. The personnel files.”
“What do you mean ‘leery’?”
“I suspect,” said Tim, “he thinks I might be a spy.”
“Sorry?”
“This Reception Centre,” said Tim, “doesn’t answer to the Local Education Authority like an ordinary school. Right? We’re not open to inspection or regulation. You can’t just drop in. No visitors without written consent. No parents popping in. No nosy journalists. Nothing gets past the Custodian’s Lodge—not even tradespeople—without Uncle Arthur’s say-so. We’re like the prisons. We’re under the aegis of the Home Office. For example, when I applied for this job, I was interviewed in London and assigned here. What about you?”
“Bristol. In an office in the Labour Exchange place. He did have pinstripe trousers, though.”
“Right. But do you see the point? You weren’t interviewed by these people, Eastmill people, were you? We’re part of a deliberate new policy, you see, to feed more university graduates into the system. Same thing goes for the army, the police, and prison services—we’re probably flagged for fast promotion. And why? Because eventually those so marked will hold top positions and they’ll be slightly more civilized than the present norm and more fit for public consumption than the Old Man and Uncle Arthur.
“But because we’re favoured from on high, we’re resented everywhere else. They’re paranoid about us. They think we’ve been planted to uncover their deficiencies. There’s a strong feeling we’re not of them.”
“I hadn’t thought about any of that,” said Rob.
“And in my case, old cock, they’re exquisitely fucking right. I am not of them.”
“At breakfast this morning,” said Rob, “Mr. Austyn said that someone in Approved Schools with a degree was a rara avis.”
Tim nodded.
“Know what the inmates call him? Browner Austyn.”
“But I suppose,” said Rob, “resenting us, you can see their point of view.”
“Fatal,” said Tim, wagging a finger, “the seeing of other points of view.”
“So,” said Rob, “how long have—”
“My seventh month coming up. Feels like eons. Saving up the shekels. And when I’ve filled my poke with nuggets, I’m going to the States and I’m going to drive around in an automobile the size of a landing craft and fuck coeds. Pompom girls. The ones in the little white skirts. What about you?”
“It was the only job in the area I could find advertised. Because I wanted to stay around here because my girlfriend’s in town, you see, and—”
“And do you intend teaching,” said Tim, “for ever?”
“I was quite happy reading,” said Rob, “and Madras chicken curry for breakfast at noon but the grant ended…”
“You were on a State scholarship?”
Rob nodded.
“Woe and alack,” said Tim, “and so you were forced onto the streets to hawk your dubious wares. But this service to humanity, this saving of souls, say you don’t envisage a lifetime of this.”
“I don’t envisage a lifetime of anything.”
He paused.
“Tim…? About Uncle Arthur…”
“Be warned,” said Tim. “More there than meets the eye.”
“When I arrived the other night…”
“Have you seen Mrs. Arthur?”
Rob shook his head.
“No reason. Just asking. Just curious. Sightings,” he added, “are blessedly rare.”
Rob recounted Uncle Arthur’s incomprehensible nods, winks, nudges, the mid-morning business, the chain of command, the implied threats, and the seeming assertion that the solitary figure spiking up litter was the Headmaster.
Tim nodded through this recital.
“The old NCO thing,” he said, “bullshit baffles brains. This litter business is simply a reversion to that less stressful time when he had a job he could actually understand and perform.”
“So you mean it was the Headmaster?”
“Oh, yes,” said Tim. “Before he was headmaster he was employed by Eastmill as a municipal gardener. Not, you understand, as anything fancy, a landscaper, say, no, a day-labourer. So how did he get this job? Coached boys’ soccer, cronyism, old army contacts, who knows? It was all murky years ago. Labour Party stalwart? It happened long before university graduates were even dreamed of. It was all a part of the prison system being a working-class structure. Just as the police pretty much are.
“As to Uncle Arthur’s mid-morning warnings, what was being conveyed to you—or not conveyed—take your pick—is that the Headmaster is brutally drunk every evening by seven.
“Picking up litter, that’s the only connection he has left to a world he can still vaguely grasp. Humble, bumbling, lovable old Uncle Arthur keeps him sodden—it’s delivered in an unmarked van every Friday—and Uncle has increasingly undermined him on all fronts and is now the de facto power.”
Rob nodded and nodded during this recital.
“Some mornings,” said Tim, “the Headmaster actually manages to appear at Morning Roll Call and Assembly. He’s always purple, snaky veins in his temples pulsing, and his face patched with bits of bl
ood-dotted lavatory paper. His inspirational addresses are…”
Tim slowly shook his head.
“…memorable,” he said, “memorable.”
He paused, smiling, seemingly in gratifying recollection.
“He picks up litter, you see, because by doing that he feels he is still doing his job, doing the right thing.”
Tim paused.
“Enough to bring a tear to the eye, isn’t it?”
“It all sounds like a film, a Cagney,” said Rob, “or a Graham Greene novel.”
“Interesting,” said Tim. “Interesting you’d mention Greene. He wrote it.”
“Wrote what?”
“The Third Man. Orson Welles. The zither film? Penicillin. You saw it?”
“Harry Lime,” said Rob, nodding.
“Because,” said Tim, “I suspect that Uncle Arthur actually was in the Army of Occupation in Germany. In the stores. I see him as a sergeant. And he would have compromised a Quartermaster and then corrupted him entirely—booze, boys’ bums—and there they were flogging food, cigarettes, nylons, drugs… same pattern, you see…”
“Strewth!” said Rob making a mock-astonished face. “What have I got myself into!”
“Learn to live in the world, old son.”
Tim bent himself over the arm of the chair and picked up the ring binder.
“Arson!” he exclaimed again. “The little bugger burned down three derelict row houses. Shows a certain level of something or other, wouldn’t you say? The social-working mind explains this as the expression of anger at childhood deprivation or abuse, or as a deformed sexual imperative, but the social-working mind seems not to grasp that theft, arson, mayhem in general are exciting, enjoyable, that they’re good fun.”
“Well,” said Rob, “maybe so, but being practical, what do you do with such a boy?”