Half-Sick of Shadows (14 page)

10

Junior School Photographs

After fast times with Miss Ballard and Satan in year three, things settled down and time moved much more slowly. At some time, from somewhere, I picked up the phrase ‘existential boredom’. I must have chanced upon it in the library while trying to read something too advanced for my years. I, somehow, knew that my existential boredom had, at its heart, waiting. Waiting for something. Anything. Perhaps I’d been bored to death waiting for something, anything, in a past life. Anyhow, that’s what I had: existential boredom.

Had I been unaware of what ailed me, I’d probably have done something mad … like throwing myself under a parked train, or tying a bed sheet to a light-fitting and hanging myself, or tying a bed sheet to a light-fitting and hanging somebody else, a smaller boy than me – had there been one. There was one, actually: Alf Lord.

I wouldn’t have hung Alf from a bed sheet attached to a light-fitting in a million years. He and I had become friends. That is to say, we smiled at each other and said hello. We were friends in so far as, unlike the other boys, we had no need to shout at, strike, kick or bite our peers or charge about the place like demons.

Alf always had a jotter and a pocket full of pencils. He shielded his jotter with one hand and scribbled with the other.

One day, I spoke to Mark Jeffery about Alf, in the sophisticated,
extended
, abstract and complex way that children speak to each other. The conversation went roughly as follows …

Me: Where’s Alf?

Mark: Who?

Me: Alf.

Mark: Who’s Alf?

Me: Alf! You know.

Mark: No, I don’t.

Me: Alf that sits over there.

Mark: There’s nobody there.

Me: Is that your soldier?

Mark: Yes.

Me: Can I play with it?

Mark: No.

Often absent from class, Alf, I assumed, had health problems, a swollen brain or something: he was very smart. When present, Alf’s presence fuzzed my own brain – like when the dinnertime bell rings and you’re nearly sure you ate dinner an hour ago. Quiet and averse to sports like me, small and lightly built like me, Alf sometimes made me jump by looking out of mirrors at me. I noticed him more in year three after Christmas, when, instead of being fuzzy, he came into sharper focus. The other boys were in colour, but Alfred Lord only ever turned up for class in black and white. The other boys had three dimensions, but Alfred Lord, when you looked closely at him – although I don’t think anyone ever did – had two.

Nobody except me bothered with Alf.

Each time I left the Manse, I missed Sophia dreadfully. As time passed, I missed her more than anything: more than newly blind men miss sight, more than orphans miss parents, more than Father missed his bible when Sophia hid it under the sink with the washing powder.

… which is why I wrote to her and promised that next time I returned to the Manse, I would not return to school. I would live the
rest
of my life in the Manse and fixed to her side like a loving shadow.

I never questioned whether Sophia still lived, still played, still ate and still got bored in the Manse.

Still she helped Mother with the chores, just like before. Nothing changed at home except my removal from the scene. I never questioned, and yet the absence of her voice, her laughter and the clucking of the hens as she chased them made a gap, a void, where I would have questioned had I been less preoccupied with my own sufferings. I yearned to hear Sophia’s voice. Even hearing it without seeing her face would have sufficed.

The senior school had a telephone in the prefects’ room, but juniors never went there. Risking my life to use the seniors’ telephone would have been fruitless. I knew no number and the Manse lacked a telephone. School encouraged juniors to write letters, even if they were only a few lines long and in crooked block capitals. Sophia and I wrote tomes to each other every week. One of our most commonly occurring words was still, which Sophia spelled with one l. While I still hated school and the food was still rotten, Sophia stil missed me, and Father’s nose was stil in his bible. Sophia was stil freezing, and I still missed her too. Possessing her words on paper, and an imagination with which to hear them in my head, was no substitute for having my other half beside me.

In her reply, she wrote that my not returning to school after the next break was wonderful. She left out the d in the middle, but I didn’t care. She said Edgar wanted me home too. When she told him about my promise, he was so thrilled he wet himself. Good old Edgar! He never let Mother down when washday came round.

Meanwhile, Mr Hogg, the sports master, had a bigger evil streak than any other teacher. He looked a bit like Satan – which might have been why I never saw him talking to Miss Ballard.

Forced to play sports outdoors regardless of snow, ice-javelin rain, lightning or hurricane, I might have died from pneumonia. Running
about
a muddy field half naked, trying not to die twice a week convinced me that Mr Hogg wanted me dead or disabled. He favoured sporty boys who made friendships and rivalries, and who cemented their friendships and rivalries through cross-country running and kicking a ball around a football pitch in Noah’s Flood weather conditions. I was always the boy third from last in cross-country running, with only the fat boys puffing along behind.

Mr Hogg could always find me, when he felt like a backside to smack with the sole of his running shoe, shivering behind the changing rooms with my hands in my oxters as I endeavoured to stay as far away as possible from everything that looked like a ball or as though you were supposed to run on it. In Mr Hogg’s opinion, cold showers first thing in the morning would toughen me up. I failed to see how.

Nevertheless, with my toughening up as his end, he made me get up every morning before everybody else and do exercises, like star jumps and push-ups, naked under the shower while he watched, sitting on the edge of a sink with his arms folded. These sessions lasted about fifteen minutes. The teeming icicles on my body made me quite sick and dizzy by the end. Mr Hogg always said that I did well, and I was a good lad at heart, as he dried me down with a school towel rough as a toilet brush. He paid particular attention to my private parts. Apparently, I could get a nasty rash between my legs without proper drying. The toughening-up programme failed.

Mr Hogg finally gave up on me.

Sometimes, admittedly, I cried and made no attempt to hide my tears. There were few places to hide them. I heard snivelling behind locked cubicle doors, and the echo of that sound in a toilet is truly pathetic. There were no private places. Boys were everywhere. And, when they weren’t crying, they were prying, tumbling, rough and tough, loud and foul. But boys were only half of the awfulness. Teachers were the other half. Boring lessons were half of it too, and the food half as well. And we had to go to church on Sundays, which wasn’t too bad, just
unbelievably
dull. When supposed to sing praise Him praise Him we sang braise Him braise Him. That’s as good as it got.

When verbally abused by my peers, I shrugged and asked myself, rhetorically, what did I expect? When physically abused, I picked myself up, turned my face from notions of revenge, and knew my tormentors would get what they deserved one day. That’s how God works, Father said: there’s justice in the end. When the victim of practical jokes, no matter how cruel they were, I pretended to see the funny side. Unexpectedly, my passivity reduced the number of attacks. The bullies grew tired of me.

Life might have seemed tedious then, as I lived it. Of course, looking back, lots of eventful stuff went on: lots and lots and lots.

For example …

Mr Ryan taught year fours. I was not in the least looking forward to him teaching me. When Mr Ryan spoke, he sounded like air-conditioning. He always talked as if his listeners didn’t care about what he had to say, and, therefore, he didn’t care either. Everyone – including his fellow teachers – called Mr Ryan the Old Bore.

Mr Ryan, however – so the rumour went – got himself fired by Blinky for getting his wife pregnant – his own wife, that is, not Blinky’s. If Mr Ryan had got Blinky’s wife pregnant Blinky would really have fired him – with a flame-thrower, I should imagine.

Peter McCrew, who seemed to know more than most people about such things, said getting someone pregnant involved some kind of shenanigans suggestive of Mr Ryan’s being not quite such an old bore after all. Indeed, he stopped being the Old Bore and became the Dirty Old Sod. I knew dirty old sods; Father put them on top of Granny Hazel after he buried her. The connection between a dirty old sod and a pregnant Mrs Mr Ryan escaped me. A deep wisdom stopped me from asking Peter McCrew to explain what he meant. At around this time I discovered that although women can get pregnant, men cannot … which I took in my stride. Men and women are different. Sophia didn’t have a willy and I did.

I knew pregnant meant the woman in question had a big belly with a baby inside, but remained in the dark about how the mechanics worked or why you would get fired for getting your wife it. Peter McCrew said Mr Ryan couldn’t control his trouser snake.

Soon, there were all kinds of rumours about how men got women pregnant. Some of the rumours had pre-existed, but I never paid attention to them before. Other rumours were new – at least, new to me. The stuff about fertilizing eggs sounded like an April fool scam. I knew women didn’t lay eggs; hens did that. One rumour – Peter McCrew’s invention – was that a man stuck his willy into the woman’s bottom and peed.

How on earth? You’d need some kind of shoehorn!

A new teacher, called Miss Fish, arrived to substitute for the Old Bore. Miss Fish came to be known as the Old Cow. She made us take turns reading aloud, and ate sandwiches behind her desk most of the time. I thought we would have Miss Fish all year, but she got pregnant too. It had nothing to do with Mr Ryan: because I asked …

Standing in front of the class one day, smiling in a dizzy-headed kind of way and patting her bulge, ‘Not long to go now,’ she said.

‘Did Mr Ryan do that?’ I asked.

She had a giggle-fit and never recovered.

I liked Miss Fish after that.

Obviously, her boyfriend couldn’t control his trouser snake.

Before the Christmas play,
Pinocchio
– I knew not what Pinocchio had to do with baby Jesus other than that they were both real boys – Miss Fish thanked us for being good children and said that teaching us had been a pleasure. Gosh! We blushed pink, even Alf in black and white. Geppetto morphed into a puppet maker suspiciously like Blinky Mulholland. Miss Fish said she would not be back after Christmas; Mr Ryan would have returned by then.

Blinky must have forgiven him for making his wife pregnant.

I spilled a pot of paint – red for Geppetto’s cardboard house – on Peter McCrew’s trousers, and he punched me in the head. He would have murdered me if Miss Fish and her bulge hadn’t stepped in.

11

Changes

Dear Edward

I hope you have been wel. I have been sick but I am better now. The big news is that Father might put me in Granny Hazel’s bedroom. I hope not because I do not want to go. I do not know why he wants to move me about. My legs are making all my dress too short. Mother says we should have a speshal party because we wil reach double figures next birthday.

Yours sincerely, Sophia

Suddenly, time seemed to be running out like the Whitehead House junior eleven from the changing room … me in my scarf and gloves, the sports master poking his head back inside: ‘You too, Pike.’ There was so little time ahead before double figures, and I had been wasting the present, daydreaming through it pretending to be receiving an education. What would be the point of having received an education if time ran out? My education would be of no use to me. When I reached ten, that would be it; no more unique numbers, just the same zero to nine over and over again until all my years ran out. I was afraid. What could I do? Was there a way, like alchemy, to mix the existing single numbers – even though, strictly speaking, zero might not be a number – and create new single numbers?

Extensive experimentation in this field, with a pencil and sketch pad, occupied more of my time than it should have. For several months I mixed fives and threes, twos and nines, ones and fours and eights, every combination imaginable. Uniting a seven and a four produced triangles and made me speculate that creating new single numbers from the already existing ones might be impossible because some numbers from zero to nine have straight lines while others have curved lines; still others have a combination of straight and curved lines. Starting a new single number from scratch might be the only resolution. I made numerous preliminary sketches to that end. Although some were more pleasing to the eye than others, the names I invented for them seemed purely arbitrary, and that did not seem right.

These were days of changes, internal and external.

Internally, school changed me, stripped me from Sophia, my other half, and made me stand alone like a target. My age had two numbers instead of one: 1 and 0 – although the ancient Greeks were unsure about 0 as a number. They asked how nothing could be something. Having thought about this, at length, I concluded that nothing must be something, since if, say, you have something – perhaps an elephant – and someone takes it away from you, you have nothing, which must be something precisely because ‘no elephant’ is something you have. You can say: I have no elephant. But you cannot say: I have not no elephant, which would mean either that you do indeed have an elephant or that you can’t speak right.

Externally, Father set wheels in motion that changed the Manse. In Whitehead House, I missed most of the changes as they happened, but Sophia’s letters kept me up to date, and I saw the changes for myself when I went home.

One day, yellow bulldozers appeared on the horizon and out from the edge of Hollow Wood. Lorries came too, stacked with machinery and
raw
materials and piles of clay-coloured pipes. The rumble was audible if you went far enough across the heath. Father watched from his bedroom window through a telescope retrieved from the loft. Men in orange vests and hard hats turned pristine green into a construction site. They crept along daily, weekly, monthly, like a loud snail leaving a trail of grey in their wake.