Half-Sick of Shadows (17 page)

Edward the Conqueror hopped off the chair, said, ‘Thank you, Sir,’ and, cardboard folder under arm, had some trouble opening the door because the wood was quite heavy.

Some boys in senior school had cameras. Their parents were better off than mine. My camera was imaginary. Here’s a photograph of my black, laced shoes – needing polishing – which I took as I lay on my bed with my ankles crossed. My ankles spent a lot of time crossed on the bed, usually when my hands were behind my head and my elbows stuck out like wings. Here’s another that looks the same, except my shoes are further from my long trousers. Did I really wear white socks? And here’s a photograph of me in the library, in short trousers, bare knees under the desk. Here’s another snapped by my brain in the library. I like this one. Standing by a bookshelf, one hand in a pocket, my other hand holding a book by a famous physicist who said the most important thing for people to know is that everything’s made of atoms.

Atoms are mostly empty space. Therefore, everything is mostly empty space. Including me. I once told Sophia she consisted of mostly empty space. Gregory, listening in, said, ‘Especially her brain,’ which I thought cruel.

By the time of this incident, it had become important to me to behave towards other people in the way I wanted them to behave towards me. But in Gregory’s case I made an exception. Mother made
beef
stew for dinner that night, and into Gregory’s bowl I crumbled two of Father’s max-strength soluble laxatives. Mother caught me doing it. Embarrassed, I apologized, fingers and toes crossed that she wouldn’t tell Father. Mother said I shouldn’t have done it, because one max-strength laxative would have been plenty, and she’d already crumbled one in. We didn’t see much of Gregory that evening, or next morning.

But Feynman and the others came later.

As did Mr Starch, who taught Biology and Environmental Issues – a new subject on the curriculum. Starchy had the unenviable task of enlightening fourteen-year-olds concerning the facts of life. When we heard the facts of life were going to be taught to us, much discussion occurred in dormitories about what they were. Opinion split, almost fifty/fifty, over whether the facts of life involved how women have babies – some boys continued to propose the absurd idea that men stab women in the bottom with their penises – or facts such as that most people get sick at one time or another, and everybody has to die in the end. I came down on the side of the latter. Getting sick in life, and eventually dying, seemed just about as factual as life could get. To my surprise, the boys with the absurd idea were, apart from in the details, correct – we acknowledged this on discovering that the term ‘sexual reproduction’ related to ‘facts of life’.

Starchy was comfortable with pictures of tadpoles in textbooks, but anxious when questioned about the mechanics of sexual reproduction. Much of what we learned about how new humans came into existence came not from understanding the swimming of thousands of doomed tadpoles towards an egg for the purpose of penetration by a last man standing – ‘winner takes all’, as Mr Starch put it – but from information gleaned from porn – and hard porn if we were lucky – magazines that entered via the caretaker and found their way from dormitory to dormitory. Fights ensued over torn-out glossy pages with their gloss thumbed off. In the dark, at night, beds rattled with rapid hand movement under sheets. My peers introduced
me
to a new vocabulary, new possibilities … new impossibilities, since there were no girls at Whitehead House. Some chaps lusted for Mrs Gordon, the French teacher, while other chaps lusted for other chaps.

I liked Mr Rourke. I found him interesting. He scratched his head and muttered a lot. Chalking on the blackboard, with his back to us, he puzzled everyone by saying things like, ‘Twenty into two hundred and seven goes ten times and seven over – that’s a nought up there. And twenty into seventy goes three times and ten over – that’s a three down there and a ten up there. Add a nought on the end and twenty into a hundred goes five times. Where does the decimal point go? Anybody?’ Sometimes he didn’t ask any questions, but stuck his chalk behind his ear and left the classroom for no apparent reason. Everybody said he was mad.

I thought of my mind as a camera – a box camera, really, and my memory as a box within the box. The more I thought about it – and my private room afforded me lots of time for thinking about such things – the more the importance of my memory box grew. It grew until it and my mind box were, more or less, indistinguishable. The natural progression of this thought was that ‘my’ merged with ‘memory/mind box’ and became ‘me’. In short, I was my memory/mind box: a trinity. Three in one.

One mind-box photograph bullied its way to the front of my memory/mind box. This is a photograph of heavy rain on a dormitory window. The window has twelve small panes framed in green-painted wood. The window changes and becomes one pane of glass. Sometimes, when I look, there’s no rain. Other times, there’s a storm. I’m always in front of the window with my back to the twelve panes and rain, or the one pane and none. I’m in my school pullover and short trousers, or school pullover and long trousers. Sometimes, in the photograph, I’ve had a haircut. Most times, I need one.

The top of my head is lower than the top of the window frame. The top of my head is higher than the middle panes. I’m comfortable in some versions of the photograph because the radiator under the window works; in other versions, I’m cold because it doesn’t.

When I was eight, Mr Brown brought a stuffed alligator to class. When I was nine, I got chicken pox. Nothing so exciting happened in senior school until we had snow one May. Peter McCrew, no wiser as a senior than he had been as a junior, slipped and broke his arm. Word came from our teachers, or from somewhere, that the cold weather was because of a phenomenon called the Greenhouse Effect, or, possibly, Global Warming, which meant the planet was getting hotter. I probably needed my ears syringing.

The senior side of Whitehead House pulsated with acne and angst. It reeked with hormones and stale sweat. I yearned for a spot on my milky face. One or two small ones would have qualified me to join the club, but no spots came. Dark-haired boys shaved with disposable razors while I inspected my chin in the mirror and yearned for fluff. Having been led to believe puberty would put up more of a fight, I thought I might have been suffering from some or other exotic disease: antiadolescencitis.

The puberty war would end with me scarless and pristine. Oh well! I would have made a pathetic veteran anyway. I had lived long enough to be standing at the door to manhood – officially – with a hand on its brass knocker, but I could not enter manhood while I looked like an angel. If only, I speculated, I could lose my virginity. Losing it might corrupt my flesh and make me rough. But did I want to be rough, really? Did I want to be like the others? Did I want to be the kind who gets sweaty and boggle-eyed at the thought of a stiff penis entering a girl’s vagina? Would losing self-control please me? To all these: no.

And so I went in the opposite direction (where would I find a girl
anyhow
?) and became the school monk. The wags called me Brother Pike because I seldom spoke and preferred solitude. Knowing I lived in a place called the Manse, they also thought I was religious. I could have done more to correct their error, but it gave me a vaguely enigmatic identity, and I much preferred to be called the Monk than the Wanker.

In junior school I stayed in one classroom all day, but in senior school I moved to a different classroom every forty minutes to learn a different subject. Each forty-minute teaching session constituted a period, and we had eight periods each day. On a few days each week I got double periods, and eighty minutes spent learning a single subject seemed like eternity – especially Maths. On Friday mornings, I got a double period of Science with Mr Flannigan. Compared to my teachers in junior school, my teachers in senior school were a gruesome lot. I had seen most of them around. Even Father’s grim countenance looked healthy and benevolent in comparison to their sickly, cross faces. Mr Flannigan was an exception.

Mr Flannigan had a pinkish red face because of the blood vessels strong drink broke on his nose and cheeks. He was, to his credit, by far the jolliest of my teachers. Flannigan must take credit for my decision, at thirteen years of age, to be a scientist. And not just any old scientist in a white coat, smelling faintly of chemicals; I wanted to be a physicist. And not just any old physicist; I wanted to be a theoretical physicist. I wanted to be a theoretical physicist because I had read about some theoretical physicists speculating that the universe I lived in might be one of many.

I asked Flannigan about this. ‘Is our universe the only one, Sir?’

‘Good question. Who knows, young Spike. It might be a needle universe in a needle universe haystack. The thing is, this is science, and we need to test our ideas.’ He gave a drawn-out shrug like a clown. ‘How do we test the needle universe haystack theory?’

How would I know? The science of it interested me less than the mystery.

‘If there are other universes, how many are there?’

‘Billions!’ Flannigan ejaculated, almost literally. ‘There might be billions and zillions! But, without a mechanism for testing, how can we know? Are you interested, young Spike? How’s your Maths?’

‘Slightly better than awful.’

He nodded his head thoughtfully, and said I had to start somewhere. He promised to consult the Maths teacher about extra tuition. I was unsure of how I felt about that, and asked if I could be a theoretical physicist without the Maths.

‘Can you eat mince pies through your ears?’ he asked.

One day, in my room, I discovered a thin book of poetry that Alf had left behind:
Fifty Great Poems
. As usual, when I looked for Alf I didn’t find him. Then I did a bad thing.

I tucked the book away to give to Sophia on my next return to the Manse. Having done so, I did not feel guilty. Something still and deep suggested to me that I had done what Alf intended.

There were only one hundred pages. There were a handful of long poems, but most were short, and I hoped my twin would enjoy them. When I gave her the book, she thanked me, and kissed me, and read poems the way Edgar ate porridge. Poetry wasn’t her thing, and after I returned to Whitehead House it never got a mention in any of her letters – which I thought a pity.

13

My Final Year: Blinky’s Proposition

I began my final year at Whitehead House in anticipation of an uneventful run through to the exams in May. No such luck. Someone must have had in mind a career for me teaching in junior school – either that or they were short-staffed and I came cheaper than an agency substitute. Whichever: I had no choice. My first assignment was to the classroom of a familiar face.

A decade or so had passed since I, a ragamuffin, first beheld the school siren: Jezebel, otherwise known as Miss Ballard. She had been past her sell-by date then, held together by plaster and paste, bands and straps, and she had in the intervening years passed through her use-by date en route to a date with the great junior school classroom in the sky. She limped along on two walking sticks these days, wore house slippers, and her feet were bandaged up to her shins.

Miss Ballard, still a miss after all these years, had a word in my ear before addressing her class. ‘Are you new?’

‘No, Miss Ballard. I was in your class many years ago.’

‘You’ll soon find your way around. We’re all friendly here.’ She pinched my pullover at the neck and drew us a few inches closer. ‘No matter what else you do in life, look after your ankles.’

Then she released me and introduced me to her class.

‘Quiet, children … Thank you … This is Mr …’

‘Pike,’ I said, when she turned to me for help.

‘This is Mr Pike. He’s from the senior school. Some of you might already know him. Mr Pike is one of our very best students, so listen carefully to what he has to say. And remember, if you work hard, you too might grow up to be as clever as Mr Trout.’

‘Pike.’

‘Eh?’

‘My name’s Pike.’

‘I know!’ She looked at me as if I were stupid. ‘Mr Pike is new to Whitehead House, so be nice to him. He’s going to read to you from … some book or other, while I …’ She turned from twenty or more bad haircuts behind desks and looked up at me for a clue.

‘Assess my reading technique?’

‘Reading technique?’ Her face crinkled inward like scrunched foil until she looked like a Cyclops. ‘You can read, can’t you? Why do they want me to assess your technique?’

‘I just thought …’

‘Open your mouth and say out loud what your eyes see on the page; that’s technique enough for anybody.’ She turned back to her pupils, fidgeting behind desks. Half had sticky mouths after break-time bread and jam. Half had used snotty sleeves of pullovers to wipe their mouths clean. One picked its nose; another sucked its thumb.

‘He’s going to read while I, like you, relax and enjoy the story. To make it interesting, listen carefully and see if you can tell me, afterwards, who the main character in the story is. Now, before we begin, who can tell me what a character is?’

The nose-picker raised an arm.

‘Yes, Gabriel?’

‘My daddy says my mummy’s a character when she’s pissed.’

‘Very good, dear. I’ll hand you over to Mr Fish now.’

Miss Ballard limped to a chair with arms in the corner, and left me to sweat, eyeballed by wall-to-wall manikins.

I began in the time-honoured way by clearing my throat.

‘Good afternoon, everyone. I mean, morning. It’s still morning, isn’t it?’ Oh God! The children of the damned! Stop staring at me!

‘Today I’m going to begin reading the first chapter of a very exciting book, and when I’ve finished I hope you’ll continue reading it in your own free time from where I leave off … if you can get a copy, that is, from the library … which might only have one copy … and it might be out. In fact, this might be it. But don’t worry, there are lots of other books in the library, and if you can’t get a copy of this one, feel free to pick a different book you think you’ll like.’