Before I could remember to be shy I said “I write about the future sometimes, sir.”
“You have visions of what’s to come, do you?” When he gazed into the pram I thought he might have been reflecting that Tina was his future, though his eyes had grown so dark that they could have been contemplating the depths of outer space. “Well, Mr Sheldrake,” he said, “what do you write?”
“Just stories, sir. Some of them are about what might happen.”
“I’d be interested to read those. Perhaps you ought to show them to Brother Bentley for the magazine as well.”
He wheeled the pram across the road and into the park, and once we were well past the gates I let Winston off the lead. As he dashed away to chase a flock of pigeons off a wide expanse of grass—“Pidgin,” Tina seemed to cry, as if she was describing her own language—I decided this was my excuse to leave Mr Noble behind. I was about to make my farewells when I saw a woman striding towards him.
Her face was so broad, and the features were so substantial, that it resembled an exaggeration of a face. Framing it used up most of her headscarf, barely leaving enough material for a knot. Several uncertainly auburn strands of hair had escaped from the scarf to cross the deep lines of her forehead. Despite her bulk she looked somehow depleted, drained of energy if nothing else. Perhaps this was why she was close to breathless with determination, repeatedly squaring her shoulders as she approached. “Christian?” she called.
I might have answered yes, however automatically, but she meant Mr Noble. I saw him ready his expression—a moderate smile with a hint of surprise—before turning to face her. “Why, whatever brings you out, dear?” he said. “Don’t you think you may catch cold?”
She was bundled up in a heavy overcoat that was a little too big even for her, and I supposed that her condition left her vulnerable to the wintry chill, though this had lessened since we’d crossed the road. “Where did you take her?” she demanded in a voice that was regaining breath. “Who has she been talking to now?”
“Why, to Mr Sheldrake. Isn’t that so, Mr Sheldrake?”
Up to this point she’d seemed to regard me as no more than a distraction she was determined to ignore, but now she peered so hard at me that her frown clenched her face. “This is Mr Sheldrake, dear. One of my Holy Ghost men,” Mr Noble said. “Mr Sheldrake, this is Tina’s mother Bernadette.”
Since I had no cap to raise I held out a tentative hand, which Mrs Noble gave a look that made it droop. “I asked,” she told her husband, “where you’ve been.”
“Don’t embarrass Mr Sheldrake, dear. You can see where we are.”
“And where were you before that?” Mrs Noble lurched towards the pram as if she meant to seize it from him. “Where did he take you, Tina?”
I could tell that unlike him, Mrs Noble didn’t expect their daughter to respond. I might even have thought she was nervous of hearing an answer, because she swung around to face me. “You’ve been with them, have you, Sheldrake?”
I felt not just interrogated but scrutinised, and not only by her. I could have thought that Tina’s gaze was rivalling her father’s, which made me realise how little she looked like her mother. “That’s right, Mrs Noble,” I said.
“And what have you been doing with them?”
“Just walking the dog,” I said and brandished the lead, which brought Winston back at a run.
“You know what I mean,” she said like a teacher displaying the last of her patience. “Where have you all been?”
“Like Mr Noble said, in the park.”
“And where before that?”
I felt as if her stare was shrivelling my vocabulary. “I just said.”
She kept up the stare as though it could probe out the truth, and then it succumbed to weariness. “I understand,” she said. “You can’t say too much or you might find yourself in trouble at school.”
This hadn’t occurred to me—as much as anything, the way she used my surname had made me side with Mr Noble—and he said “I hope Mr Sheldrake will never have a reason to think me so vindictive.”
His wife was still watching me, but as she parted her bitten lips Winston started barking for attention. “I think we’d better head for the happy home, dear,” Mr Noble said. “We don’t want Tina’s ears hurt, do we? You know how sensitive they are.”
She gave him a look that refused to admit defeat. “Then let me have the pram.”
“By all means, dear. She’s yours as well as mine. You shouldn’t feel left out. You ought to tell me if you do.”
Some if not all of this seemed to enrage Mrs Noble so much that it choked off her words. She clutched the handle of the pram before her husband let go, and I thought she came close to wrenching it out of his hands. As she wheeled the pram away at speed Mr Noble marched after her. He was overtaking her with ease when he glanced back to give me a single blank-faced nod.
I called Winston, who’d wandered off to chase birds out of a bush, and hooked the lead to his collar. Once the Nobles turned a bend in the path I followed them, and reached the gate on the corner of Walton Lane in time to spy them at a house on that road, Mrs Noble backing the pram over the doorstep while her husband lifted the front wheels off a terse garden path. The sight struck me as oddly mundane after the encounter I’d just had.
An entrance to the cemetery faced the exit from the park. As I took Winston home I noticed that only the opposite side of Walton Lane was built up. The graveyard overlooked the rows of houses interrupted by side streets, or would have except for a thick spiky hedge. I was being one of the Tremendous Three, playing the investigator. Sometimes I wish it had stayed a pretence.
The festive rhythm on the knocker brought Mrs Norris to her door. She looked confused, as if I’d woken her. “Thank Dominic for your walk,” she said, and Winston held up a paw for me to shake. “And thank your parents for the invitation, Dominic.”
“Didn’t you go round?”
“Something kept me here, would you please tell them. But you can take Winston whenever you like, can’t he.”
I hoped she was addressing the last phrase to the dog. His ears pricked up none too eagerly as she shut the door, and then she began to talk. I wasn’t sure whether she was speaking to Winston, and I wasn’t anxious to overhear, since I had to report to my parents. I was barely home and hanging up my coat when my father came into the hall to complain “Did your Mrs Norris get lost on the way?”
“She had to stay in her house, dad.”
“Is she still up to those tricks?” He might have been interrogating me in her stead by demanding “Are we going to be told why?”
“I think she needs to talk to someone.”
“I think she does too.” Presumably this was clear enough not to need elucidation, and he said “Anything else we should know about?”
Since I’d sneaked my previous answer past him, I felt confident at keeping secrets. “No, dad,” I said, and perhaps it would ultimately have made no difference if I’d kept less to myself. Just the same, now I know that year was the beginning of the end of so much that we took for life.
1953
6 - The Creeping Future
Every Friday morning before lessons Brother Treanor gave a talk to the assembled school. Generally it warned us of the latest perils of the world, and always led to prayers, often for the victims of events—the family murdered by terrorists in Kenya, the hundreds of people drowned in the North Sea flood, a disaster apparently designed to remind us that God’s plan was too large for us to grasp. By contrast, Derek Bentley’s execution somehow demonstrated that British justice came from God. We prayed that the hydrogen bomb stayed out of the hands of our enemies or, if they got hold of it, that God would send us the means to destroy their weapon. Brother Treanor’s fiercest prayer was aimed at Crick and Watson, who he believed were venturing too close to the sacred secret of creation, along with the scientists he held responsible for putting the Big Bang into our heads. He wasn’t much less passionate about
forbidding us to watch From Here to Eternity—“a filthy film of a filthy book,” he proclaimed, emphasising the adjective with vigorous nods of his oversized head—before it had even been released. One especially spectacular performance involved a horror comic found in a fourth-former’s desk. “Never forget the Americans are our friends,” Brother Treanor told us all, “but remember also that their influence can be pernicious,” and once he’d lectured us about the evils of comic books and Hollywood and jazz he spent some minutes tearing each page of the offending publication into the smallest shreds he could produce, after which their owner had to collect every fragment from the stage and bear them away in a waste bin.
I wasn’t far from knowing how the boy must have felt. Of all the aspects of my encounter with the Noble family, I was most impressed with Mr Noble’s interest in my writing, and so I brought “The Tremendous Three in Space” to show him. I waited until the end of the Monday lesson before lunch. A discussion of the Light Brigade had led to an argument about the inevitability of war, during which the teacher suggested that some people were born to die for the benefit of others, perhaps of a very few. I wondered if he regretted having said so, because he seemed preoccupied when I approached his desk. “Mr Sheldrake?” he said, though not at once. “Are you bringing me a problem?”
“Sir, you wanted to see this.”
“Did I? Why was that?” He didn’t bother sitting at his desk while he leafed through the exercise book. “Ah, I recall,” he said and gazed at me as though to ascertain how much I remembered. “This is your future, is it, Mr Sheldrake?”
“It’s just a story, sir.”
“I believe I recommended letting Brother Bentley see it for the magazine.”
I was seeking confidence by asking “What do you think he’ll think of it, sir?
“I can’t speak for our religious brethren.” As if to leave this admission behind, he declared “I should hope he’s in favour of creation.”
This helped me approach the editor, a fat monk whose expansive mottled face wore a constant disappointed look. “Write your form and your form master on it” was how he greeted my submission when I found him in the dining hall that lunchtime. “Neatly, Sheldrake.”
At least this didn’t feel like a rejection. I wanted him to see the story I was proudest of, where the Tremendous Three discovered that a neighbour who worked late in his allotment was building a space rocket in his outsize shed. He was a spy as well, and took Bobby prisoner when he caught her writing notes about him on her pocket typewriter. She might have been shot into space, never to return, if she hadn’t managed to alert Dom and Jim with a photograph she sent from the phone she’d hidden in her shoe. The boys were in time to stow away but not to release her, and once they’d survived being crushed by the take-off all three took over the controls. After flying around the moon they returned to earth to find that Dom’s dog Winston had trapped the Russian spy in the wreckage of the shed. I went to bed imagining how the tale would look in actual print, and when Brother Bentley beckoned to me next day in the corridor I went eagerly to him, though his habitual expression hadn’t changed. “What do you mean by it, Sheldrake?” he said.
“I’m not sure what you mean, sir.”
“That’s what I asked you, boy.” Having given me time to suffer from the reminder, Brother Bentley said “This nonsense you imagine is appropriate for our magazine.”
I felt my face grow suffused, and more so when I realised all the passing boys could hear. “Sir, I didn’t think—”
“That’s painfully apparent. What in heaven’s name possessed you to perpetrate such rubbish? Do you honestly believe there will ever come a time when most people own a telephone, never mind one they can carry about with them?”
“Sir, I did read—”
“I won’t ask what your parents permit you to read, assuming they do. Just you make sure it comes nowhere near the Holy Ghost,” Brother Bentley said, “A telephone that transmits pictures, by everything that’s holy. Don’t you even know the difference between a television and a telephone?”
I was so thrown by his reaction that it felt like a defence to say “We haven’t got any at home.”
“Sir.” Once he’d extracted a slavish echo, he homed in on my worst outrage. “And people flying to the moon,” he scoffed. “The Astronomer Royal himself says that’s balderdash. Do you consider yourself to be more of an authority on the subject than one of our leading scientists, Sheldrake?”
“Sir, it’s just a story.”
“Stories ought to tell some kind of truth or they have no business being told. I suggest you look to your Bible for an example before writing anything further.”
As he grasped the book in both hands my innards shrivelled, I was afraid he meant to treat my tales the way Brother Treanor had dealt on the stage with the copy of Witches Tales. Perhaps he simply meant to dismay me, because he thrust the book at me. “Be thankful I’m not confiscating this,” he said. “Never bring it to the Holy Ghost again.”
I almost dropped the book in my haste to keep it safe. I was stowing it in my satchel when he said “At least you were right about the Godless neighbour.”
I was shamefully eager to learn “How, sir?”
“I suspect there are far too many of his sort lying low amongst us. It is our duty to keep watch for them.” This sounded like a call for the Tremendous Three, but I wouldn’t have asked what he thought of them even if he hadn’t turned away with a sombre flurry of his robe. I was wishing I could hide my reddened face while I fumbled my coat off the hook in the corridor when Jim gave me a sympathetic grimace, having overhead. “Miserable old,” he said, but fell short of another word.
I saw Mr Noble leaving the school and hurried to catch up with him. “What’s the calamity, Mr Sheldrake?” he said, rather more than glancing at my face.
“Brother Bentley doesn’t like my story, sir.”
“I’m sorry if that’s the case. I did say I couldn’t speak for him.”
“I mean he really hates it. He thinks I oughtn’t to have written it.”
“I can’t see what you’d have me do about that, Mr Sheldrake.”
I felt so betrayed that I let out the only protest I could think of. “He said I had to put your name on it, sir.”
“My name.” He halted so abruptly that Jim bumped into me. “How is he saying I’m involved?”
“You’re our form master.”
“Ah, I understand,” Mr Noble said, laughing as if he ought to have seen the joke sooner. “He didn’t mean I gave you visions of the future. You carry on telling your tales, Mr Sheldrake. I can’t see what harm they could do.”
I felt patronised, reduced to less than my age. I made for the gates, hardly caring if Jim kept up. At the stop I struggled onto a bus in the midst of a mob of boys, and Jim fought his way along the aisle to join me. “What’s your story about?” he said.
“You can read it if you like.”
He couldn’t then, since we were standing, not to mention staggering whenever the bus pulled up at a stop. The driver seemed determined to treat us all like skittles, perhaps in retaliation for the way we’d piled onto his bus. After Jim and I caught a tram at the crossroads we were able to sit down. “Can I see your story now?” he said at once.
His eagerness heartened me, and felt like loyalty as well. Our stop was in sight by the time he finished reading, and he handed me the book as he stood up to tug the cord that rang the bell. “Did you like it?” I was surprised to have to ask.
He didn’t turn to me until we’d left the tram. His close-set features made his face looked squashed before the corners of his large mouth turned up towards a frown. “Why did you have to put us in it?” he said.
“Because it’s about the Tremendous Three.”
“Okay,” Jim said, a word forbidden by the Holy Ghost or at least the school, “but why have you got to use our names?”
“Because that’s who we are.”
“I wish you hadn’t, Do
m. You don’t want everybody laughing at us, do you?
“You think my blasted story’s that much poo.”
This was stronger language than I’d ever previously used—I’d have been afraid to let my parents hear me saying damn or hell—but just then I didn’t care if the policeman who was gesturing us to cross the road arrested me for it. “I didn’t mean that, Dom,” Jim protested as he hastened after me. “I’m just glad it won’t be in the magazine for everyone to read.”
This felt like even more of a betrayal than Mr Noble had perpetrated. I was about to stalk home, leaving Jim behind, when Bobby stepped down from a bus that had drawn up on our side of the road. “Bobby,” Jim called. “Come and look at this.”
“You come here if you want me to see anything.”
She sounded like the girl we knew, and despite her school uniform she looked like it too. One kneesock was around her ankle, and a pigtail was well on the way to unravelling. As we went to her she yanked a strip of plaster off her wrist, revealing several reddish scratches punctuated with scabs, and dropped the plaster among the used tickets in a bin. “What have you been falling off, Bobs?” Jim said.
I wouldn’t have been surprised if the marks were souvenirs of a climb up a tree or over a wall, but Bobby raised her big-eyed face to point her nose and chin at him. “I had a fight with a girl.”
“Who won?” I said, only because I was sure I didn’t need to ask.
“Me,” In case this wasn’t sufficiently forceful she added “It didn’t need a plaster, only my mum said.”
“What did you tell her?” Jim was eager to hear.
“What happened. Why wouldn’t I? Her and dad say I’ve got to stand up for myself.”
“What was the girl doing to you?”
“She kept calling me Hanger.”
Jim began to laugh, but a look from Bobby stopped him. “Why?” he said.
“You’d better not think she was right, Jim Bailey. Nobody calls me that now.” With an even fiercer look Bobby said “She kept telling everyone I looked like I’d left the hanger in my blazer.”
The Searching Dead Page 6