Futuretrack 5 (2 page)

Anyway, Mr. Grimshaw played “Autumn” as soon as he set foot on dry land, which at least got it over with.

He played very badly, nearly having a bulge-cheeked heart attack. We kept the kids from giggling by prodding them in the back with stainless-steel biros, our badge of office. The Head clapped louder than anybody else, gave me a straight look, and said that when Kitson made his speech of welcome, he would no doubt wish to thank Mr. Grimshaw in his own way. During my speech, the psychopter again became audible. Maybe it was after Mr. Grimshaw; you had to be pretty disturbed to make noises like that.

The oddest thing was the way the parents failed to react to the psychopter. I could see the kids turning to put out their tongues at it or putting up two fingers behind their backs. But the parents never by a twitch acknowledged it existed. Like they were afraid to.

The parents trooped off to “ooh” and “aah” over displays of work. Our college wasn’t strictly a naval college, because the few ships the navy had left were entirely manned by electronic mickey mouses. But being situated beside the Solent, we’d been given a naval touch, which gave us so many more useless things to learn. How to splice a hempen rope into a turk’s head, when everybody’s been using heat-sealed nylon rope for the last seventy years. How to tie fantastic knots like sheepshanks, when everyone else fastened rope with a laser welder. How to scramble like performing monkeys round the rigging and spars of three great sailing-ship masts, stuck in the concrete of the drill ground and looking quite genuine till you tried to carve your initials on them, when they turned out to be case-hardened vinyl. It was great, later that day, balancing on those masts a hundred feet up, clinging on by two toenails and an eyelash, to hear one of the watching mums say, “And I got a really lovely purple snakeskin pair for only seventy Eurocredits. …” Three second-years got a fit of the giggles and fell off into the safety nets. Since they were only thirty feet up, that was fine, except the giggles became an epidemic, half emptying the masts and filling the nets with second-years wriggling like fish. Two broken collarbones and the Head giving me a long upward look saying, Bad show, Kitson.

How could I stop mothers’ silly mouths?

We prefects changed into six different costumes that afternoon for giving the complete sequence of Nelson’s flag signals at Trafalgar, for a display of hornpipe dancing, a comic bum-boat race, for hurling real Victorian field guns over artificial obstacles, for a strawberry tea with the mothers, and finally for an all-too-real dinghy race in which two third-years rammed two more, then tried to run them down and drown them while they were struggling in the water—only we referees got there just in time.

The parents continued their uncomprehending cheers. Finally, the Padre’s Evening Hymn, Flag Lowering, and Last Post on Massed Trumpets (rather better than Mr. Grimshaw’s offering).

Suddenly it was all over and the mothers were reem-barking, dabbing their eyes with Edwardian lace handkerchiefs (handmade in Vietnam) to the sounds of the
Viperous’s
ship’s band, in more pensive mood, playing “Will ye no come back again.” So, the boats departed (the handkerchiefs, scarcely damp, now being used for waving).

Their lethal offspring went with them.

That left the sixths, whose parents never came to Parents’ Day, but sat at home, taking hot baths and waiting, swallowing Valium tablets helped down with the odd discreet gin, eyeing the clock and the antique revolvers on the study wall…

The festive side was over; the bloodbath could begin.

We stood and waved, till the ships faded into the Portsmouth haze. When there was no more point in waving, we stood and watched the sunset. It was only the first banks of cloud let through by the weather bombers, bringing overnight rain; but a blood-red sunset’s nicely symbolic…

Silence growing. Solent lapping against the seawall. Distant rattle of mess boys scraping squashed strawberries off the Head’s lawn. Breeze getting up. Sudden flaps and cracks of awakening flags making a muscle in my eyebrow twitch. Around the shadowy ivy-covered college, the sudden swooping and screaming of house martins seemed menacing.

For us, after ten years, college was dead. All summer long, lesson bells would ring in empty classrooms echoing with birdsong. Long before the first new boy sat on his trunk in the autumn porch, we’d be a once-remembered joke, a face in a team photograph hung on the wall. What had it all been
for,
that sweating on mast and held gun, that swotting of antique facts?

Well, the dreaded E-level results, for one thing. O-levels at fifteen, A-levels at seventeen, X-levels at nineteen, and E-levels at twenty. … I glanced secretly at my watch, folding my arms in a way that dragged my blazer cuff up. Black mark for looking at your watch openly, now… They’d be watching us from the staff room. Standing back from the shadowy windows secretly assessing our moral fibre.

Twenty minutes to seven. E-level results in fifty minutes. By then, most of us would be Ests for life, not just children of Est families. Cushy careers as archaeologists or astronomers, poets or racing yachtsmen (which I wanted). Gracious old houses. Book-lined studies with real log fires. Obedient, soft-spoken wives who could cook in the style of Provence or Cambodia and play the grand piano without actually fracturing your eardrum. Chinese house servants,
real
coffee. Children in moderation.

Some of us, the ones who failed the E-level, would be packed into vans and driven through the Wire and never heard of again.

Ests bred too fast. Two per family was the rule. But the big-boss families had seven or eight, to prove how big they were. So every year the E-levels weeded us out, like unwanted puppies.

It was almost a luxury, standing there, letting the breeze cool my sweat, letting the first prickings of terror run up my neck into my well-combed, sweat-soaked hair. But that wasn’t fair—it wasn’t my terror. I knew I’d passed: crosschecked with Alec. Hadn’t dropped any marks at all.

Roger, standing beside me, had failed. Alec and I had coached him like hell, really burned the midnight oil. But too often he’d smiled, eyes clouded, and said, “Don’t worry. It’ll be all right on the night.”

It wouldn’t. He was going through the Wire and he knew it. He was still calm; eyes just a little bit too wide as if to drink in enough of the sea, the sunset, and his friends. They had no sea, beyond the Wire. Maybe they couldn’t bear to look at the sunset. Did they
make
friends?

I got near the Wire once, when I was four. Our Chinese gardener left the gate unlatched. I’d wondered a long time about that distant gauzy Wire that ran across the hills, cutting them in half. Our side was all trees and cottages, hedges and signposts and ladies on bicycles who sometimes gave me sweets. The grass was very green.

Beyond the Wire, the grass was grey and empty. A few tall concrete lampposts; grey blocks of buildings peeping over a treeless hill.

When I finally reached the Wire, I found it was two wires, ten yards apart. The near one just smooth green plastic; the far one tall, black barbed wire with bits of newspaper fluttering like trapped birds.

Between them, plants grew higher than my head, a jungle of cow parsley and young sycamores. Fascinating new insects buzzed, crawled, and flew. I thought I saw a rabbit. I thought I’d found the Garden of Eden; got lost in an insect-haunted daze, hanging on the Wire and sucking the plastic strands.

Then I heard a “ping.” Peering through my jungle, I saw a man with no nose.

He’d
had
a nose; I could see where it had been. Now he just had two holes to breath through. He’d no eyebrows either. Just purple rings encircling his eyes, making them look tiny and staring. And purple ears, with long gold daggers hanging from them. Bald, except for a long yellow horsetail that sprouted from his head and flowed

down his back. He wore tight purple trousers and a ragged gold waistcoat that left his shoulders bare and glistening with sweat.

Did he have some terrible disease? But he seemed happy, whistling monotonously as he cut a hole in the far Wire with long-handled shears.

I waited for him to come through the hole, so I could see him better. Far off, an electric bell started to ring, but I didn’t know what it meant.

Finally, he crawled through and stood up in the jungle, waist-high in plants, delighted as me with my Garden of Eden.

Then he raised his shears like a sword and began hacking the Garden of Eden to pieces, very thoroughly, green plantblood running down his arms.

“Stop!” I shouted. When he saw me he seemed more pleased than ever. Grinned, showing teeth filed to points, not like mine at all. Began cutting through the second wire, very quickly.

After that, everything happened so fast. He finished his second hole, crawled through. Beckoned to me, with that pointed grin. Something made me back off. He drew back the arm that held the shears and threw them at me. They winked in the sun. I ducked, just in time. Then he ran at me.

There was a fizzing. Blue lightning jumped onto his back and he fell down. The lightning sort of burned a black hole in my eyes; everything I looked at had a black hole burned through it.

Then somebody else came running up, shouting shrilly, dragging me away from the Wire and the man with no nose. I thought it was an older boy at first, but he had a yellowy-brown face and a khaki uniform and a black crash helmet with the vizor pushed up. That was the first time I ever saw a Paramil. The blaster in his holster smelled funny, like when my mother’s food mixer broke down. A
zxngy
smell.

He went on dragging me, trying to stop me looking over my shoulder. But I still caught a glimpse of the noseless man. Another Paramil was bending over him, feeling his wrist. When he let the wrist go, the bare arm flopped down in a funny loose way I often tried to imitate, but never could.

The Paramil bundled me into a high, green, petrol-smelling car with knobbly tires and drove me home, gabbling into his radio all the way. I was unfairly sent to bed. Voices rumbled a long time, downstairs, before the car drove away. My parents both came up to see me. Mother was as white as a sheet. Father had drops of sweat on his top lip that he kept licking off. He said I’d caused terrible trouble. For my parents who’d let me stray; for the security company who ran the Wire; for the Paramils who’d had to “fill in an Unnem.”

I was bloody-minded, near tears. What was an Unnem? How did you fill one in?

“Shut up,” shouted my gentle father. “All you need to know is this—if you ever tell anybody what happened, you won’t
have
a home or a father or a mother. …”

I never mentioned it to a soul; Paramils have long memories. But at our fifth-year celebration nosh-up, Roger got slewed and told a very similar story. From looks on faces, most of us could have matched it. Everyone knew what happened to Unnems who crossed the Wire, but you didn’t talk about it. Your new Chinese houseboy might be a plainclothes Paramil.

I was still standing dreaming, on the seawall, like a plastic chimpanzee, and tension was mounting. Some of us would be Unnems within the hour. I must move; mustn’t keep them standing there while panic grew. It wasn’t the doomed like Roger who’d crack, but those who still hoped against hope, rechecked their exam answers ten times a day, were terrified there’d be a hiccup in the Results Computer.

Like the one two years ago. The kid was rescued by his father, before they could put him through the Wire. They broke out into the Atlantic in their racing yacht… were later said to have drowned in a sudden squall.

In beautiful Parents’ Day weather…

Move,
Kitson! Do your duty. Follow the ancient— ahem—thirty-year-old tradition of the college. As the Head always said, “Walking is an
excellent
antidote for anxiety, Kitson!”

So I traditionally turned to my best friend, Roger. Tried not to imagine him minus nose and eyebrows.

“Fancy a stroll to the Lookout?”

He batted his eyebrows up and down, comically. “If you like.”

I hoped the staff had observed his eyebrow act. They said this waiting was part of the final exam; perhaps at this very moment, they were feeding Roger’s eyebrows into the Results Computer. Half a percent for guts?

Alec fell in beside us. Then the captains of sailing, squash, lacrosse, athletics, badminton, rugby, and throwing-field-guns-over-obstacles. Then the rest. We strolled slowly up to the seawall toward the Lookout that glowed like an arrowhead against the gathering dark.

Nothing else to do, except lie on your bed and go mad.

I kept the pace down, in spite of wanting to walk faster and faster and the pressure building up behind. I’d timed this walk often, the past month. Looking sneakily at my watch, I knew I was getting it right.

We were silent, mostly; afraid we might speak too loud, or gabble. We steadied our pillbox hats against the stiffening breeze and pretended to enjoy the fabulous evening. The tide was going out, exposing the seaweed. Concentrate on the
redness
of its smell… White gulls, gliding and hovering, kept us company, still sunlit against the dusk.

We turned at ten past seven, bang on time. The pressure behind was terrible now, like an avalanche on my back. Six times I deliberately slowed my pace. Once, they began edging past me, and I thought there was going to be a stampede. But Roger began to murmur our old song:

“I’ll be an Est For Ests are best Down to their sodding wooly vests. …”

It steadied us. Just as well. There was a wink of telescopes from the staff-room window…

We got back with two minutes to go. Across the quad, the Results notice board reflected the red sun in both panes of glass.

We’d all agreed to stay outside the gate till the pass list was pinned up. Then stroll across. But imperceptibly, like a lava-flow, starting with the most frantic, they began to inch toward the board. Uncanny. They still appeared to be standing, talking, shifting their weight from one leg to another, yet all the time they were drifting away. Faces like chalk, sweat beading out, tongue tips licking lips, Adam’s apples bobbing with compulsive swallowing. The staff were openly leaning out of the staff-room windows now, eager as spectators at a boxing match, making bets who’d crack first.