I thought it best to look away from her broad straight shoulders and concentrate on the angry dots and dashes on her wrist. I’ve no idea where Jim found to look until she said “What did you want me to see?”
“Show her, Dom.”
“I don’t know if I want to.”
Was I being coy or shy? Whichever, it still makes me wince. “Go on, Dom,” Bobby said. “I showed you my scars.”
“It’s nothing. It’s just a story I wrote.”
“It’s a story about us,” Jim said.
By now my disinclination was more of a performance, and I lingered over rummaging in my satchel. “You won’t like it,” I said once I felt unable to delay producing the exercise book any longer. “He thinks it’s putrid.”
“I never said that,” Jim protested. “I don’t want boys calling us things like that girl called her, that’s all.”
Bobby handled the book with a delicacy bordering on reverence, qualities she’d never previously displayed. She dawdled over the title page, which I’d painstakingly inscribed in letters imitating print: Tales of the Tremendous Three by Dominic Sheldrake, aged 10 and 11. She leafed through the book as we made for her road, and then she halted. “Are these all about us?”
While I wasn’t certain of her tone, I could only admit “Yes.”
“Can I have a lend of it to read?”
“You can borrow it,” Jim said. “I mean, you can if Dom says.”
“All right, Mr Clever. We can’t all go to grammar school,” Bobby said, punching his arm hard enough to make him flinch. “I can speak better than you if I want to. My dad says more girls would pass if the perishing exams weren’t fixed.”
Jim smirked but dodged out of reach of another punch. “Why would anyone be doing that?”
“To keep girls down. My mum says they won’t be able to much longer, not when all the women worked so hard in the war.”
Jim glanced at me. “Her mum and dad sound like what Bent was talking about.”
In a tone that threatened worse than a punch Bobby said “And what’s that like?”
“Just someone in one of my stories.” When this failed to placate her I said “Someone who doesn’t like how the country’s run.”
“They don’t. My dad’s in a union and my mum won’t stand up for the queen.” As Jim opened his mouth to condemn at least one of these offences Bobby said “So can I take this home? I’ll take care of it, promise.”
“If you want,” I said, hoping my indifference hid my desire for praise, and watched her slip the book like a fragile treasure into her satchel.
Jim and I left her at the end of her road next to ours. I wondered if it was my book that made her raise a fist and shake it slowly twice in the code we’d lost the habit of using—the sign of the Tremendous Three, the silent Morse of its initials. We responded with the gesture, but as we headed home Jim muttered “My dad says he’d arrest anyone who insulted the queen.”
I might have asked if his father belonged to the police union, but I was too busy enjoying Bobby’s esteem for my opus. Just then the book and her opinion seemed as important as anything else in the world. I still have the book, as if it even slightly mattered. I have a copy of another book from that year, and I wish it mattered just as little. However suspicious of the future Brother Bentley was, he could never have foreseen where that other book would lead.
7 - A Voice from the Past
Brother Treanor marked the Easter week with accounts of the agonies of Christ that were as gruesome as any horror comic. Every sin we committed added to Christ’s sufferings, he told us: arguing with prefects, smoking while we were in uniform or staining the school’s reputation in any other way, eating meat on Fridays or being otherwise unholy on a holy day, not attending church on any day of obligation or letting our attention stray while we were there, failing to pray with sufficient fervour, entertaining impure thoughts, coveting more than the share God had allotted us, neglecting to honour authority… By now I was worrying about Bobby’s parents and their views, but besides daunting me with a sense that practically anything I did might be sinful, the headmaster was disturbing my concept of time. I took my doubts to the classroom, and felt sufficiently at ease with Mr Noble to ask “Sir, how can what we do hurt Christ when he’s already been crucified?”
Mr Noble raised his eyebrows, but his widened eyes kept their expression dark. “Perhaps you should put that to the headmaster.”
“It’s not supposed to be how time works, is it, sir? If we do something now it may change the future, but it can’t go back into the past.”
“You disappoint me, Mr Sheldrake, You’re meant to be the science fiction man,” he said, and no longer just to me “See it as symbolic if you like.”
“How do you mean, sir?” O’Shaughnessy said.
“Some things can reach back.” For a moment Mr Noble seemed to be gazing at someone who wasn’t in the room, and then his darkened gaze returned to us. “Perhaps your tradition symbolises that, Mr O’Shaughnessy,” he said.
“It isn’t only mine, it’s everybody’s here. It’s yours as well, sir.”
“I appreciate the reminder. If you have any further questions on the subject you had better address them to the brethren.”
This was aimed at me as well, and felt like a rebuke I couldn’t quite interpret. If he was blaming me for having raised the issue, I didn’t think my doubts had been resolved. In one more day the school would break up for Easter, but since Brother Treanor had already dealt with the crucifixion at grisly length, I wondered what he could have kept in store for Thursday morning—possibly the resurrection? Perhaps good deeds could reach back to help Christ emerge from his tomb, and I hoped the headmaster might offer us this reassurance.
On Thursday it was clear at once that he wasn’t going to give his ordinary sort of talk. A solitary chair had been placed at the front of the stage where he customarily stood, and his march onstage was less forthright than usual, while his stance beside the lone chair wasn’t far from deferential. “Today we are honoured to be visited by an old boy of the school,” he said. “He’s here to speak to the boys who will be visiting the battlefields, but his words will benefit you all. Please stand up for a hero of the great war. Mr Noble?”
As we all stood up with a shuffling rumble like awkwardness rendered audible, Mr Noble moved away from his chair on the stage. I was wondering how he could be related to an event so far in the past—it might have been another demonstration of the unreliable nature of time—when he vanished through the door beside the row of chairs. “This way, father,” he said, though not at once.
A series of wooden thumps preceded the man who eventually limped onstage. If Mr Noble hadn’t called him father I wouldn’t have known they were kin. Even at his full height the stooping man would have been inches shorter than his son, and his flat squarish snub-nosed loose-lipped face could have had very little in common with the teacher’s even before it grew wrinkled and grey. Half of his uneven steps were emphasised by thuds of a stick, on which he leaned while he lowered himself by halting degrees onto the isolated chair. When Mr Noble offered to support him, the old man grimaced, shaking his head until his son retreated. “Mr Jack Noble,” Brother Treanor said and swept a deferential hand towards him.
As he and the teachers sat down we all did, and the old man hitched himself forward with his stick to peer in a generalised way at us. “You boys don’t know how lucky you are,” he said. “I expect you’d like to hear about the war.”
His voice was stronger than the rest of him appeared to be. We murmured assent, which sounded as though nobody wanted to be singled out by saying an actual word. “Life in the trenches, is that the favourite?” the old man said. “The lice and the rats and the food we ate if they didn’t get to it first? Or do you want how I lost my toe?”
He held up his right foot, exposing the eroded heel of the shoe, and squinted over it at us. “One of you pipe up for pity’s sake,” he urged. “It’s worse than talk
ing to the dead.”
For an instant I glimpsed his son’s resemblance to him, though only because they both looked as if they thought he’d said too much. Then a boy some rows behind me called “Yes please, sir.”
Brother Treanor jerked his head up. “Please remember to raise your hand if you wish to speak.”
“No call for that. My boy’s the only teacher in the family. It’s the toe you’re after, is it, lad?”
As the headmaster subsided while his gaze did the opposite the boy said “Yes please.”
“I was luckier than some of my pals. If the water kept getting over the tops of your boots you could think about kissing your legs goodbye. Trench foot, they called it, but it was trench leg half the time. How many of you chaps change your socks three times a day?” When the only response was a leaden silence the old man said “Three times was recommended, but most of us had to make do with twice. At least the medics chopped my rotten toe off before it got to any more of me.”
I suspect I wasn’t alone in wondering how much we were meant to laugh at his inky humour, if at all. Most of the teachers looked monolithically respectful, and I thought Brother Treanor was trying hardest. “You’d think you’d be scared of getting shelled most of all,” Mr Noble’s father said, “and some of the lads never stopped even after they came home, but some of us ended up dreading the rain just as much. It didn’t only rot you, it could get into your food till it wasn’t fit even for the likes of us, and I’ve seen soldiers buried when a trench collapsed with all the rain.”
If it was a memory that made him pause, it let Brother Treanor say “Mr Noble is telling you how brave the soldiers had to be.”
“We didn’t feel brave. We just got on with it because we had to, those of us who managed. You’d be surprised what you can get used to if you’re stuck without a choice, but I never got used to the lice.” The old man peered at us as though searching for an infestation… “I don’t mean the kind some of you may have,” he said. “You’d know it if you had trench lice. Once they took a liking to you they were yours for the duration, and it didn’t matter how much you washed your clothes or yourself, that’s if you had the facilities. And I can see some spotty faces but trust me, you’re pinups compared with how we looked after the lice had been feeding on us.”
Brother Treanor looked ready to direct the lecture, but he hadn’t spoken when the old man said “The rats were the real devils, though. They’d steal the food out of your pockets given half the chance, and you’d wake up with them on you when you were trying to catch up on your sleep. Shelling didn’t see them off, and gas didn’t either. I used to think if we were all killed off, the rats could take over. Maybe they’re the future of the world, or something else that isn’t us.”
I saw his son and Brother Treanor react to this. Mr Noble’s gaze grew so distant that it left all expression behind, while the headmaster opened his mouth in dissent and looked close to speaking up. “Some of them were bigger than your head,” the old man told us. “We didn’t like to wonder what things like that fed on. Once I saw a rat come out of a dead man’s mouth and take the lower jaw with it.”
Ac the headmaster took an audible breath the old man used his stick to point at someone in the middle of the hall. “I said no need to stick your hand up. We’ve had a war to stop the likes of that. What’s your question, lad?”
“Did you kill anyone, sir?”
“1 thought I had once. Heard him scream a lot, and then he stopped. I’d have put him out of his misery sooner, only the officers were telling us not to waste ammunition. And then I kept hearing him whenever I tried to sleep. It’s my belief that if you’re mixed up in someone’s death you may have a job getting rid of them once they’re dead.”
This time his son as well as Brother Treanor looked near to speaking, but the old man hitched himself around in his chair to face the headmaster. “Sorry if I’m not what you ordered,” he said. “I don’t want your boys going off to see the pretty battlefields and just thinking how sad it was, that’s all. If enough people know what it was really like, maybe they won’t be anxious to repeat it. Maybe there won’t be so many dead.”
“Pray continue, Mr Noble. I’m sure everything you have to tell us will be discussed in class.”
“There’s one battlefield I hope they won’t be visiting.” Having lingered over saying so—I couldn’t see who he was looking at—the old man inched himself around to face us. “I won’t tell you where it is or what it’s called,” he said, “Maybe it’s not marked. I hope it’s somewhere nobody goes anywhere near.”
A boy behind me spoke for all of us. “Why, sir?”
“Because I don’t believe it can have changed that much. How can I put it so you’ll understand?” The old man clutched at his stick, though he appeared to be seated securely enough. “It felt,” he said as if he was trying to restrain a memory, “hungry for the dead.”
I began to raise my hand before remembering I needn’t. “What does that mean, sir?”
“I’ll tell you what happened and you can decide for yourselves,” Mr Noble’s father said, taking a firmer grip on the stick. “We were well used to digging up the countryside as soon as we stopped anywhere, and to start with that place looked like more of the same, just a field in the middle of nowhere much. There were a few bits of a big old building of some kind or other, but you could hardly tell which bits had been part of it and which were just lumps of rock. One of us thought it might have been a church, because he dug up something he said was a gargoyle, only it was a lot uglier than any gargoyle I’ve ever seen on any church. It didn’t have hands or a face, just a lot of stuff like grubs where they ought to have been. The lad who found it chucked it in the middle of the field and said he wished he could have buried it. And I’ll tell you now, I wished I’d dug somewhere else than I did. Because when I stuck my spade in I felt I’d woken something up.”
I I was so eager to hear more that I forgot to keep my hand down. “What, sir?”
“Something that wanted us dead, that was waiting for someone like us.” The old man sighed, a sound like losing faith in language. “It doesn’t sound too likely when I say it now, does it? It didn’t seem too likely there either, in a field with the sun shining on us for a change and so many birds singing in the trees you couldn’t have counted them. I asked my pals if they felt anything like I did, and not a one had. Maybe I was chosen somehow.” He shook his head as if to expel some unwelcome item and said “I never asked them if they noticed what happened while I was digging. The birds stopped singing one by one, and we never heard any there again.”
“Perhaps hearing you men digging drove them away,” Brother Treanor said.
“You’d like to think so, wouldn’t you? I know I would. Only just then I felt every time I dug the spade in it’d touch whatever was waiting under there.”
I could hardly wait to ask “Did you see it, sir?”
“Not then and maybe never. Felt it, though.” The old man ignored Brother Treanor, who had parted his lips with a noise like a tut pinched thin. “We hadn’t dug in long when they started shelling us,” old Mr Noble said. “And every time a man was killed I felt that thing under the ground come more alive. It felt like it was creeping closer to the surface, and I had to stand there and wait till it came.”
Brother Treanor cleared his throat, a shrill harsh sound. “I think perhaps—”
“There’s not much more, and then we’ll get to better things.” Just the same, the old man looked as if those might be some way off. “You wouldn’t believe I could sleep, but I did,” he told us. “You do if you’re too tired to stay awake. And that’s when I thought I saw what was under the earth.”
“Sir”—by now I’d quite forgotten any shyness—“what was it like?”
“Like the gargoyle, only bigger. Bigger than a man as well, but I somehow knew it used to be one. And I was right, it was coming to the surface underneath me, seeping up like the water in the trenches could under your feet. It got h
old of my hands, and it felt like meat somebody had tried to keep cold but it had gone off, too soft is what I’m saying. Then I think I woke up.”
Though Brother Treanor’s cough was shriller still, it failed to daunt me. “Don’t you know, sir?”
“I must have, mustn’t I? I’m here.” The old man twisted his head towards Brother Treanor. “You’ll be glad to hear that’s all of that,” he said and faced us. “It turned out the other side retreated overnight, so we moved on. But I couldn’t feel whatever was under the trench any more. Maybe it was satisfied somehow and went back where it came from. I don’t know where else it could have gone.”
As Brother Treanor made a throaty noise, not so much a dry cough as an omen of one, old Mr Noble said “I promised you better memories, didn’t I? Here’s the best one. The next time I went home was like going to heaven. Tea that didn’t taste of vegetables because it wasn’t brewed in the same vat, and meat that didn’t come out of a tin, and bread instead of biscuits. And then it wasn’t too long after I went back to the front that they signed the armistice, and us who were left went home for good, and I got the best news of all. We had a baby on the way, and all of you can see him if you look.”
I imagine every boy’s eye went to his son—certainly mine did—and several of his colleagues glanced at him. No wonder he looked uncomfortable, though I had an odd notion that he hadn’t only just begun. His father hardly helped by adding “Me and his mother treasured him even more because he nearly died. He was born at Easter, but then he stopped breathing, and the doctors didn’t know if they could save him. One of them told us they’d never seen a newborn that was so determined to live.
Brother Treanor gazed along the line of teachers at the subject of the speech and appeared to share some of his discomfort. “Mr Noble,” the headmaster said to the old man, “this isn’t really about the war.”
“I’ll get back to it,” old Mr Noble said and told us tales of carnage for most of half an hour. At least some were sufficiently heroic that Brother Treanor’s eventual thanks for the talk didn’t sound too insincere. All the same, I suspect that the old man’s anecdote about his son had lodged in more minds than mine, so that nobody was anxious to start a discussion once Mr Noble led us to the classroom. I might have been speaking for quite a few people when I said “Sir, are we going where your dad had his dream?”
The Searching Dead Page 7