Half-Sick of Shadows (18 page)

A hand went up.

‘Yes?’

‘What’s a copy?’

‘The same book as this, but a different one.’

Another hand went up.

‘Yes?’

‘If I pick a different book in the library from the story you read will it have the same story in it as the one you read?’

I glanced over a shoulder. Miss Ballard perched on the edge of her seat, staring at me over the bags under her eyes as if her ears had gone the way of her ankles.

‘Erm … We should move on, I think. The book I’m going to read from is …’ Miss Ballard had passed it to me when I came into the class, but I hadn’t looked at it. I looked now: Samuel Beckett,
More Pricks than Kicks
. ‘The book is by a very famous Irish writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in … quite a few years ago.’

A swarthy-skinned lad raised his hand.

‘Yes?’

‘I’m called Samuel too.’

‘And is your second name Beckett?’

‘No. Darisipudi.’

‘Okay. Good.’ I opened at the beginning and turned the page to start reading. Oh, God! I couldn’t even pronounce that! ‘It was morning and Bellaquack was stuck in the first of the canti in the moon.’
Oh
God … ‘I’ll tell you what,’ I said, shutting the book. ‘Why don’t you tell me your favourite books? Has anybody read
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
? No? What about
Stig of the Dump
? … Has anyone read a book … any book?’

My ears rang with silence. I thought the stiff grin on my face might crack it from ear to ear. I glanced at Miss Ballard, but her head had fallen aside, her mouth hung open and her eyes were shut.

‘To be honest … this is the wrong book, and …’ And I sweating like a pig. ‘I think we should …’ Should what? Should what? With Ballard asleep, I could walk out. Abandon the sinking ship. Just like that. ‘Okay, everyone. Put your arms on the desk and rest your head on your arms. That’s right. Now, close your eyes …’

The door opened and a boy sauntered in. He might have been in his final year at junior school or first year as a senior, but he was taller and broader than me. I could have reminded him to knock before entering, but he might have taken it badly. ‘Mr Pike?’ he asked. I acted teacherly by neither replying nor smiling. ‘Mr Mulholland wants to see you in his office.’

‘Now?’

‘I don’t know.’

I dismissed the boy with a nod. What power!

‘I won’t be long,’ I told the children – most had raised their heads to see what was going on. ‘You can have a sleep or talk if you like, but you must do it quietly. Don’t wake Miss Ballard.’

Samuel Darisipudi raised his hand.

‘Yes?’

‘What if she’s dead?’

‘You won’t be able to wake her if she’s dead.’

As I marched along polished corridors to Blinky’s office, I thought I should have roused Miss Ballard before leaving the class. I almost turned back; but if she really had died it would be best if someone else discovered her body.

Knock-knock

‘Who’s there?’

I opened the door and looked in. ‘Pike, Sir.’

‘Pike Sir who?’

‘Pike Sir Edward.’

‘Come in, Sir Edward. Have a seat. Cigar?’

‘Ah, no, Sir. Thanks all the same.’

He sat behind his desk, elbows upon it, smiling, leaning predatorily towards me, hands rubbing together. ‘Sherry?’

‘No, thanks.’

‘You don’t mind if I do.’ Blinky didn’t wait for a reply. The sherry bottle and glass must have been on the floor, because he disappeared under the table for a handful of seconds.

‘How’s it going?’

‘Fine, Sir.’

‘Wish I could say the same. They’re cutting my budget by fifty per cent. Recession, you know. Hard times.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that, Sir.’

‘Anyway! My problems aren’t yours, are they? The school’s problems aren’t yours. You’ll be on your way soon.’

‘Yes, Sir.’

‘We’ve had quite an adventure together you and I, Edward. And now it’s almost over. That makes me sad, but all things must end. My work with you, however, is not done yet.’

He drank half his pint glass of sherry in five gulps, expressed his pleasure with an airy exhalation and smiled again.

‘What do you mean, Sir?’ I asked.

‘About what?’

‘That your work with me is not done yet.’

‘Yes! No! It’s not!’ He considered more sherry, but decided not yet. ‘What is your earliest memory, Edward? If you can’t remember your earliest memory, your most potent one will do.’

Umm … There were pictures in my mind of me inside Farmer
Barry
’s lorry … Sophia stamping on ice in courtyard potholes … Father reading his bible … Father giving me the strap … church at Christmas. ‘I can’t think of one, Sir. What’s yours?’

‘The midwife as soon as I came into the world from my mother’s womb. She saw me and screamed. They slap the bottoms of newborns to make them cry, but the midwife slapped my face.’

Having heard that one before, I stared at him. Blinky stared back. I stared at Blinky. Blinky blinked first.

‘I’ve told you mine, now you tell me yours.’

‘Days,’ I said, having had time to think.

‘Days?’

‘Days, Sir. No particular day, but a general early memory of a dawning about days. Not nights; you’re asleep then.’ Blinky had a furrowed forehead. ‘Days are of two kinds, that’s what dawned on me. There are ordinary days and different days. Different days are ones with names like Christmas Day, birthday, Easter Sunday, and so on. Life is made of days the way sentences are made of words.’

‘Are they?’

‘There are lots and lots of ordinary days; they’re the prepositions, conjunctions and so on. There are fewer proper nouns and verbs; they’re the different days. It’s the different days that give life its meaning. In the same way, proper nouns and verbs make sentences mean something.’

‘Good Lord!’

I fell silent, thinking I’d said too much.

‘What makes you think there are more conjunctions and so on than proper nouns and verbs?’ While I unknotted a reply, Blinky added, ‘Perhaps you mean the same ones are repeated over and over, like the. The cat and the dog went up the hill to fill the pail with the water. That sort of thing. Not more of individually, but individually appearing with greater frequency.’ I nodded my head with uncertainty. ‘Mmm,’ said Blinky. ‘Most insightful. Mmm.’

‘Burial days are special days,’ I said, hoping that saying something, anything, would raise me from my own mess.

‘How morbid.’

‘My earliest memory is of a burial day. It was before I started school, I think. We buried Granny Hazel. The dog died too, but it wasn’t ours. We buried it with the others. We hadn’t much space left; the cemetery was overflowing. Not literally. We had reached saturation. There was talk of extending the garden …’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Our back garden is a cemetery.’

‘You mean, there’s a cemetery at the back of your house.’

‘Yes.’

‘What age were you when the cemetery reached saturation?’

‘We had to either extend the garden or exhume the bones.’

‘Is tending this cemetery part of your father’s employment?’

‘No. We all do it.’

‘Pike?’

‘Sir?’

‘What age were you when the cemetery reached saturation?’

‘Young. That’s the thing, you see. At the time, I doubted that anyone could be older than Granny Hazel. I had no idea of myself as unwhole and unstable.’

‘Oh, do speak English, Pike!’

‘I thought I would always be me, and I would have been horrified that my destiny was to transmogrify into something like Granny Hazel. Ancient. Wrinkled. Smelly. And then I would die and be buried in a hole filled with earth. And things change. Things happen. And that is when I first understood myself as an individual with a separate mind: Granny Hazel’s burial day. That’s when it began. Sophia and I were wrenched apart. Father tore her from me like a flower from its roots, and the soil that feeds it. That was the day it happened. And it was a dreadful mistake.’

‘What, dare I ask, is the precise nature of the dreadful mistake?’

I cleared my throat. ‘When my father’s mother died, Sophia’s grandmother, he asked Sophia to promise that she would never leave home. It was an emotional request in the passion of the moment, meaning never desert the family, or something similar. Being five or six years of age at the time, Sophia thought he meant, quite literally, never leave home. I thought that too, actually … And she never did.’

‘But someone must have explained to her?’

‘But the promise stuck. Sophia deteriorated.’ I tapped my head. ‘Mother has tried taking her out to Garagh, that kind of thing, but not often. She gets upset and has panic attacks.’

‘How ghastly. I had no idea.’

‘Somehow she got the idea that she’s cursed, and if she breaks her promise to Father she’ll, I don’t know, die or something.’

‘I see,’ he said, after rubbing his chin for several seconds.

‘Why did you ask, Sir?’

‘Why did I ask what?’

‘About my most potent memory.’

‘Oh! Ah … It’s … I expected the question to lead to quite a different destination from the one it did, to be honest. Mmm. Anyway: you are almost at the end of your Whitehead House journey, Pike. You have travelled a hard but hopefully rewarding road. How have you found it? Are you pleased with what you have achieved?’

‘Yes, Sir.’

‘Good. We too are pleased. You don’t look overly pleased. You look like your goldfish has gone belly-up. Is something wrong?’

‘No, Sir.’

‘I think you are telling an untruth. Your demeanour lately has not gone unnoticed. Are you worried about your final exams?’

‘No, Sir.’

‘You don’t have much to say for yourself these days.’ He awaited a reply. I said nothing. ‘I asked you here to enquire what you intend doing when your cosy school days are over. Or do you suppose we’ll
feed
you and provide a roof over your head for the rest of your days?’

‘I haven’t decided, Sir.’

‘I know you’ve been contemplating spreading your wings. There are arguments for and against pursuing higher education overseas.’

‘I mean I haven’t decided whether I’m going to go to university.’

‘What?’ He stood behind his desk and held his hands behind his back. ‘Not going to university? Our top pupil? Explain yourself, boy. Don’t you want to achieve your potential?’

‘I think, Sir, my potential got a hell of a thumping when I happened to be born where I was born with the parents I got.’

He snapped back and made me ashamed. ‘Your potential, boy, is what you can achieve regardless of unavoidable disadvantages, not what you can conveniently call upon as an excuse for intellectual lethargy, or the lesser, and in most cases forgivable, crime of failure.’

‘I’m needed at home, Sir.’

He was enraged by the notion that anything short of death should stand in the way of a university education. ‘Needed? Needed? Fewer constraints and mother’s manacles are needs that you imagine, boy. That you use the talent that God has given you; that’s an obligation!’ His face was red and moist.

‘It’s Sophia, Sir.’

‘Ah!’

‘I’m torn between her and … My strongest obligation is to her.’

‘So that’s what’s wrong with you!’

‘I feel that my moral responsibility …’

‘Your moral responsibility? One of your moral responsibilities will one day conflict with another of your moral responsibilities. I have a moral responsibility to ensure that my students receive the best education I can provide on a tight budget … nay, a laughable one.’ He mopped his brow with a handkerchief. ‘The question is, Pike: what is to the higher good? What more could you do for your sister than to make her proud of your achievements? How much better could you do than to make something of yourself and by so doing
equip
yourself to help her in the future? Hmm? Good God, boy, it’s either leave your sister now for the space of a few years, or miss the opportunity and spend the rest of your life with one arm up a sheep’s bottom, knee-deep in animal clap, married to a farmer’s daughter with fat ankles, calloused hands and a wart on her chin.’

I was speechless.

‘Is that what you want?’

‘No, Sir.’ I would have nightmares with my arm up a sheep’s bottom. He left me no choice. ‘I’ll apply for a university place.’

Blinky’s eyeballs pierced mine. ‘I’m not without contacts in academia, you know, Pike. Would you mind if I put in a good word?’

How unexpectedly decent of him. No one had ever before put a good word in for me. At best they had put in ambivalent words such as precocious.
Illuminati
: that was a good word. There were lots of good words, but nearly all were foreign. University came from Latin,
universitas
: the whole universe.

‘A good word would be wonderful. Thank you, Sir.’

‘That’s settled, then. I’ll tell them I’ve a morbid oddball I’d like off my hands, shall I?’

‘I’d be very grateful, Sir.’

Now that the possibility of university was a reality, I had to secure it and make it mine. Blinky put the scaffolding in place. It was my job to climb it. There were exams to pass and pass with the highest grades I could achieve. No one could pack the learning inside my head but me. No one could reinforce it, make it stick, and retrieve it at will on exam day but me. I rolled up my sleeves – often literally – pitched my tent in the library and revised, revised, and revised some more. The librarian said I should take more breaks and get regular exercise. I did. I exercised by turning the pages of textbooks faster.

I studied long hours in my room and in the library. My studies were more than satisfactory as far as my teachers were concerned, but less productive than I, the precocious one, wanted them to be. I
lacked
study technique. Schools should have a class called ‘How to get the best from study’. My study was like pedalling a bicycle in first gear and getting nowhere fast. Having said that, I was a street ahead of anyone else at Whitehead House – except Alf, of course.

One night, I had a strange and unsettling dream. Alf came to my room and kissed me on the lips. We kissed with tongues like giant garden slugs wrestling and evenly matched. The dream was so vivid that, for days, running into weeks, I feared bumping into Alf in case the dream was, in fact, not a dream.