He was our form master now, and also our history teacher. He still edited the magazine, and I was glad he seemed to have forgotten the story I’d shown him. He taught history with a religious bias that outdid even the headmaster’s zeal. Everything was part of God’s plan, which wasn’t to be queried. If anybody raised an awkward question, Brother Bentley’s fat face would grow yet more mottled while his standard disappointed look turned sourer. “The devil’s put that in your head,” he would rebuke the questioner. “Nobody but Satan wants to question God.” I remember feeling that God had left Satan quite a few awkward questions to ask, and I was tempted to raise some of them—whose side God had supported in the carnage Mr Noble’s father had described to us, for instance, or why God had stood by while the Nazis did their work. Although shyness kept me mum, such thoughts had begun to feel less like temptation than ideas I shouldn’t avoid having. If the school and its concept of God were opposed to them, perhaps this might even be the fault of the school.
The way some of my classmates acted, competing to impress the staff with beliefs the school approved of, didn’t assuage my doubts. After Brother Treanor warned us about gayness, Henry Shea brought up the subject in Brother Bentley’s class. “We wouldn’t have things like that here at our school, would we, sir?”
I wondered how many of us had watched Brother Mayle while the headmaster condemned forbidden relationships—the teacher had looked as innocent as a virgin if not a virgin birth—but Brother Bentley seemed to see no contradiction. “I profoundly hope not, Shea.”
“Or people who don’t believe in God like us,” O’Shaughnessy contributed. “They’re not welcome either, are they, sir?”
I was trying not to feel referred to when Brother Bentley said “They should not be welcome in your lives.”
“We helped get rid of one,” O’Shaughnessy said. “Me and Bailey and Sheldrake did.”
“We will not speak of that here.” As O’Shaughnessy looked abashed Brother Bentley said “I will just say the three of you are to be commended for your vigilance. Others might do well to follow your example.”
I wasn’t quite the rebel I’d begun to hope I might be. I didn’t simply welcome the praise, even though it left me red-faced; I craved more from the teacher who had dismissed my tale of the Tremendous Three. I suspect that was one reason why I behaved as I did about the secret book.
I saw it first on a sunlit day in June—the Holy Ghost sports day. Clouds far larger than the sports field were wandering across the sky, fraying at the edges and changing shape so gradually that it was impossible to catch them in the act. Their shadows drifted over the competitors and the cheering spectators, though Jim and I and the rest of the runners were denied any shade while we dashed five hundred yards. We’d showered and rejoined our parents, and were watching a prefect vault over a progressively elevated bar, when a man limped around the corner of the school and peered towards the field. It was Mr Noble’s father.
He had a book under one arm. At that distance I could make out only that its cover was black. He took a lopsided step towards the field, supporting himself with his stick, before glancing down at the book and then at the crowd. Some misgiving made him limp rapidly towards the nearest entrance to the school. Moments later the door shut behind him with a reticent thud.
Presumably everyone else was too intent on the pole vault to notice the old man, but I saw him limping at speed along the corridor that led to the gymnasium. As he disappeared beyond the last of the windows on the corridor I could only wonder where he was bound for. The gymnasium windows were too high to see through, but he reappeared almost at once. I watched him lurch back along the corridor to fling the door open. He wasn’t bothering to mute it now, and he no longer had the book.
I glanced at Jim to find he’d only just become aware of the old man. So had quite a few others, not least members of staff, more than one of whom stepped out of the crowd until Brother Treanor gestured them back. He strode across the field, his robe flapping louder than a crow’s wings, and met Mr Noble’s father halfway across the schoolyard. “Mr Noble,” he said barely audibly. “What brings you to us now?”
“I’m hoping you can help,” the old man said in very little of the voice with which he’d addressed all of us. “I don’t know anybody else who can.”
The headmaster glanced towards the field, where he must have seen far too many people watching. Even the boys in charge of the vaulting bar had paused at their task. “We’ll talk in my office,” Brother Treanor said and took the old man’s arm to usher him towards the school.
I was convinced they would be discussing Mr Noble, and eager to hear what was said. It might have been a job for the Tremendous Two if we wouldn’t have drawn more attention than me by myself. What would Dom have done in a tale? The moment inspiration came I hid my hands behind my back and groped to unstrap the wristwatch my patents had given me for my thirteenth birthday last month. As I slipped the watch into my trousers pocket I said “I’ve just got to go back to the gym.”
“You don’t need to go right this minute,” my mother murmured. “You’ll have people thinking you don’t care about your school events.”
“Mum, I left my watch.”
She shook her head as though to rouse a thought. “Weren’t you just wearing it, son?”
I saw Jim listening and glanced hastily away from him. “Before I got changed for the race,” I said with all the conviction I could feign.
“It’ll be safe till your sports are over, won’t it? There aren’t going to be any thieves here.”
“I don’t like leaving it,” I said, feeling desperately childish. “You and dad gave it me.”
From the side of my eye I saw Jim start to edge towards us, and was worried that by trying to help he might ruin my plan. I was striving to think how to stop him when my father said “Let him go if it means so much to him, Mary. Just hurry back, son.”
I felt ashamed of deceiving them and of using their gift as the ruse, but I dashed away without looking back, especially at Jim, I was across the schoolyard and letting myself into the silent corridor when I realised that if anybody challenged me I had no excuse to be where I meant to go. While I lingered to think one up, Mr Noble’s father might be telling Brother Treanor what was troubling him. Surely everybody else was on the field, and nobody would follow me to find out why I’d come into the school. Just the same, my heart and my breaths seemed to have entered some kind of race as I turned left along the corridor, away from the gym.
I couldn’t hear the headmaster or the visitor. No doubt they were in Brother Treanor’s office. Before I reached the bend that led there I had to quiet a pair of fire doors, which even when I eased them shut produced a thud at least as noisy as my heartbeat. Advancing to the bend involved holding my breath, and when I saw that the corridor beyond another set of fire doors was deserted I was unable to restrain a gasp, so loud that I was terrified it must have alerted the headmaster. I was hesitating when I heard Mr Noble’s father. I couldn’t distinguish any words, which frustrated me so much that I sprinted on tiptoe to the doors, a move that felt like being compelled to enact a cartoon.
As I inched the right-hand door ajar I heard the old man again. “He’d have to listen to you,” he was protesting. “You were his head.” While his voice was raised in entreaty, Brother Treanor seemed to have lowered his to compensate or in a bid to calm his visitor, since I couldn’t make out the response. To understand him I would have to venture past the doors, where there would be nothing between me and the office except the deserted corridor. Although the Tremendous Three would have braved it in a tale—even in reality, I liked to think—it was too daunting for me on my own. Instead I leaned against the door to hold it slightly open while I kept out of sight beside the small square window in the top half. I strained my ears and heard my eager troubled pulse, and then Mr Noble’s father. “He won’t take any notice of the head where he is now. He thinks he knows better than the lot of us.”
In that case surely his son wouldn’t heed Brother Treanor, and perhaps this occurred to the headmaster. Whatever he murmured failed to pacify his listener. “He’s gone further,” the old man protested. “I don’t know what he’s started. I told you he’s got more people with him.” Even when I leaned closer to the gap between the doors I heard only his words. “Someone needs to find out what he’s up to in that church… I’m past doing that and his wife’s too scared. She can’t even stop him taking their daughter… The man who fixed things up for him can’t realise Christian’s using all of them. He puts things in your head, but just what he wants you to know…” Each time the old man faltered the headmaster murmured in response, which plainly didn’t help. “The world would be better off without him,” he cried at last. “We should never have had him. His poor mother, rest her soul, at least she can’t see what he’s like.”
This shocked even me, and without managing to distinguish any of his words I could hear it distressed the headmaster. I’d begun to grow uncomfortable with eavesdropping, not least because it brought me very little that I understood. What about the book the old man had been carrying? I assumed he’d meant to show it to Brother Treanor, in which case why had he hidden it instead? I could only think he’d been afraid to let too many people know he had it. How much longer might I have before someone came to find me? The idea brought me so close to panic that I almost let the fire door bump its twin as I stepped away from it. I blocked it with my elbow just in time and, having eased it shut, performed another cartoonish sprint along the corridor.
Once I was past the door to the schoolyard I felt a little safer. At least now I was in the area where I’d told my parents I would be. I dashed past the classroom our form had this year and shoved open one of the twin doors leading to the lobby of the gymnasium. Except for those doors and the pair to the gymnasium itself, all four walls were occupied by lockers stacked just higher than my head. There was nowhere in the gymnasium to hide a book, and I didn’t think Mr Noble’s father would even have had time to go in. The book must be hidden in a locker, but which? How long might I have before he brought the headmaster?
I was turning to the lockers—so many of them were closed that the sight took me to the edge of despair—when I noticed something lodged behind the nearest set, a strip of black material squeezed between the wall and the backs of the lockers at rather less than an arm’s length from the side. I hardly dared to hope that I knew what it was, but when I slid my hand behind the lockers it was easy to retrieve. I suppose the old man’s arm couldn’t struggle very far through the painfully narrow gap he would have found, because the strip of material was indeed the spine of the book.
He must have been desperate to use the first hiding place he could think of. The featureless black leather covers of the book were scuffed and scratched by his attempt to hide it, and the pages had been dragged away from the spine on their strip of black linen. As the volume fell onto my chest it felt big and heavy enough for a stone lid. I cradled it in my arms and let it sprawl open wherever it would.
I recognised the handwriting at once. In the previous school year I’d frequently seen it on the blackboard and at the end, not to mention sometimes in the margin, of my history homework. On the board it was chalky white, while the comments on homework were in red ink, but now the extravagantly looping script was as black as the cover of the book. I read the first few sentences on the left-hand page, and they were enough.
He whom my father roused beneath the field was within me before I was born, and what may have been reborn through him? How far may we reach towards the primal source? Not only the past seeks to take hold of the world. The future yearns for incarnation, and the more remote the future, the more power it may draw from the accretion of time beyond man’s grasp of that truth…
Though I understood very little of this, I felt capable of deciphering it all if I tried hard enough. The prospect of bringing my mind to bear felt as if the words in the book were fingering the inside of my skull. Instead I shut the book, which I’d guessed was Mr Noble’s journal. As soon as I saw through the pane in the door that the corridor was still deserted I made for the Form Two Alpha classroom. I was so certain of the course I meant to take that I might have fancied the book was as anxious to be hidden as I was to keep it safe until I could read it all. I would never have been able to smuggle it unnoticed out of the school that day, and so I hid it under the books in my desk. As I hurried out of the room I had such a sense of a job well done that I almost forgot to strap my watch on before I left the school.
When I stepped out of the building I was met by a chorus of groans, the kind that might have greeted the appearance of a villain or at any rate a profound disappointment. I was close to taking it personally until I saw that a sprinter had tripped on the field. The distraction let me dash across the schoolyard while Mr Jensen helped the injured boy up, having established that his ankle was only twisted, and ushered him to his parents with some bluff words of praise. I thought I’d managed to return unobserved, but my mother didn’t let that happen. “Where on earth have you been all this time, Dominic?” she cried in a voice apparently meant to be muted. “I don’t know who’ll have been wondering where you’d got to.”
“I couldn’t find my watch, mum.” I felt my face grow red, and had to hope my parents would think she was embarrassing me, but I couldn’t look at Jim. “I only just did,” I protested, displaying my wrist as if it were evidence.
I saw her readying another reprimand when Brother Treanor came out of the school by himself and strode in a flurry of his robe towards the field. He must have let Mr Noble’s father out of the front of the school. If the old man tried to retrieve the book he would have to show himself, since the front door would be locked, but I didn’t think he would return. Perhaps taking the book away from his son was enough for him. I no longer minded the lecture my mother was continuing to deliver—I even felt my face revert to the afternoon temperature—because the book was safe.
The sports day ended with a half-mile race and the presentation of trophies, instantly repossessed for displaying in a glass case outside the assembly hall. As the spectators headed for the gates, Jim joined me to mutter “Did you follow them?”
I wasn’t ready to mention Mr Noble’s book. “Yes,” I whispered.
“Then what? Give.”
“Couldn’t hear much. Wasn’t close enough.” I saw his frustration and murmured “I think Mr Noble’s dad is scared of him. He wanted Brother Treanor to stop him doing something, but I don’t know what.”
“Maybe we ought to find out.”
Our parents looked back to determine what we were up to, which brought the discussion to an end, leaving me alone with the lines I’d read in Mr Noble’s book. They felt as if they were enticing me to read more—as if the book was hungry to be read. They kept repeating themselves in my mind like an attempt to compel me to interpret them. That night I lost sleep over worrying that somebody might find the book before I could take it away from the school. Once—it must have been when sleep caught up with me at last—I mistook my skull for a huge dark place where the words from the book were taking more of a shape, groping inside my cranium like the legs of a great restless spider.
All day at school I was aware of the book in my desk. I had to force myself to hear the teachers above the mental clamour of its words, the ones I’d read and the horde I imagined were waiting for me to read them. Whenever I opened the desk I saw the book, which the rest of the contents couldn’t entirely hide, and grew afraid all over again that someone would ask what it was. Brother Bentley did as I struggled to fit it into my satchel at the end of the last class. “Have you more of your fictions in there, Sheldrake?”
I tried to lie as little as I had to. “Sir,” I said.
He kept his discontented look while he sauntered towards me. “Is there anything I ought to read?”
I couldn’t tell whether he meant to disapprove or was hoping for the opposite. “No, sir,” I sa
id in any case.
This didn’t halt his advance, and his expression drooped still further. I had an unhappy sense that I’d made him determined to examine the book. He was raising his hands to take it from me while I strove to thrust it into the satchel. I had the wholly absurd idea that if I succeeded before he reached me, he would let it go. Just in time I had a desperate inspiration. “Sir, it isn’t finished.”
“Perhaps I had better see it when it is.” Even this didn’t stop him, and he came so close that I could smell the black cloth of his robe, a thin desiccated odour. “I should like to see whether you have followed my advice,” he said and moved away at last, only to turn his renewed disappointment on me. “If it is unsuitable it should not be brought into the school.”
Jim overtook me in the corridor. “Is he going to like it when he reads it? I hope you haven’t put our names in again.”
“I haven’t,” I said, which felt like a slyer trick than I’d played on Brother Bentley. For a moment I wanted to tell Jim about the book, but something prevented me—perhaps some aspect of the book itself. After all, I was still a child, and I wanted to keep my prize for my own at least until I’d had a chance to read it by myself. If I’d shown it to an adult at once, would that have made any difference? Could it have averted anything? None of us will ever know.
14 - A Father’s Words
When did I grasp that my parents were not the source of me but merely the medium through which I came into the world? Perhaps when I learned that the world they saw was not mine; that I was aware of presences they were incapable of perceiving. Some truths I knew before I had words for them, until they found words for themselves. In my cradle I saw how the stars were reaching for me out of darkness as remote as the time from which their light came. Even as an infant I had a sense of the nature of time which the masses never glimpse; of how the pincers of the future and the past close on the moment, for they are the twin halves of a single process. Or is the moment which the masses mistake for existence simply the closure of the circle which they misperceive as past and future? Soon even they may be unable to avoid the truth.
The Searching Dead Page 13