Pilcrow (69 page)

The Skull of Doom had been shaped over generations by sand held in the hands of slaves. For years now I had been engaged on an
abrasive
enterprise of my own. Ever since the interview at Sidcot School, when I had been accepted without needing to apply, I had been
determined
that I would go to a proper school, a normal school, a grammar school. I’d realised by now that there had never been a possibility of being sent to Lord Mayor Treloar. I was one of the best students in the school. It meant something to me, too, that Jimmy Delaney/Kettle thought I would go mad if I stayed at Vulcan.

The lump of rock quartz that I needed to abrade into shape was Dad’s resistance. I needed to wear down a mass of No into a sliver of Yes. My only tool was my tongue. I had to keep on at him. It was bad enough from his point of view when I pestered him for dry ice or square balloons, but now I was committed to the campaign of
attrition
. I wouldn’t let it go. All I needed was a recently built grammar school. Then it would have lifts. Dad might claim that there was no dry ice and no square balloons to be had in any shop, including Harrods, but he could hardly maintain there were no grammar schools in Berkshire with lifts. Sooner or later he was bound to say, ‘I’ll make this phone call if it means I get some peace. If it means you’ll finally shut up …’

It helped my cause that Dad was back in employment. Through old RAF contacts he had landed a job in the Personnel Department of BOAC, our national airline. Broadly speaking he was in a good mood. It suited him down to the ground. It was as close to a Services job as could be had on Civvy Street, stiff with officiousness and protocol.

I knew that Miss Willis wouldn’t be happy to see me go, but I
hadn’t
prepared my arguments. The summons to the sole principal’s study was peremptory. She was hoping to catch me off guard, and to nip my independence in the bud.

I found it odd to be there without Raeburn. His presence was still strong. If anything she seemed to be trespassing on his sanctum. This after all was where Raeburn had given me some of our walking
lessons
, told me about the Aztecs and their enlightened ways, and asked me whether I had sensation below the waist. This was also where he had given two sexually experimental boys their small glasses of sherry, and told them that they must be discreet and not worry Miss Willis, who was old-fashioned about such things. Behind her I could still see the spine of
Civilisation and the Cripple
.

‘I think you have been happy here, John, so I don’t know what to make of this misguided idea of changing schools. What is it that you want, John? Really?’

‘I want to go to a proper school.’

‘This is a proper school.’

‘I want to go to a grammar school.’

‘This is a grammar school in all but name. Our educational
programme
is ambitious. It’s odd that I should have to make mention of the fact to someone who has benefited from it for some years now. Vulcan has a precise name, corresponding to a precise function. This is a special boarding school for the education and rehabilitation of severely disabled but intelligent boys. And you are severely disabled, John. You need a high level of care. You are also intelligent, but not more intelligent than a number of boys who have gone on to success in their exams, and who have started to find their place in the world. Are there subjects you would wish to study that are not provided for here?’

‘Chemistry, Miss Willis. Chemistry is an important subject. And I want to play the piano.’

‘If you are serious about chemistry I will see what can be done. As for the piano, it is not Vulcan School that disqualifies you from it. You can’t simply ignore your limitations if you are to make the most of the opportunities you have.’

‘Miss Willis, I want to go to a normal school.’

Marion smiled. ‘No school that is able to meet your needs could be described as normal, John. I am an educationalist, and you must trust my expertise. If there was the remotest possibility of disabled boys thriving in any old school, do you think that Mr Raeburn and I would have gone through our various ordeals to set up this one?

‘You are already a pupil at an exceptional school. Why throw away what we have achieved together? Is it perhaps that you want the
academic
company of girls? Because I can tell you that girls may be a
disappointment
, if you are hoping for special friendships and tender sympathy.’ She was barking up the wrong tree there, of course. Perhaps she was referring indirectly to her own school-days. In her bleak smile could be read a certain amount of suffering.

‘I want to go to Burnham Grammar School. Not because there are girls there.’

‘And who will devote themselves to your care at this school? To put it at its most basic, who will take you to the lavatory there?’

‘I’ll manage.’

Marion said, ‘John, I’ve come to know you better than anybody over the years, to understand your qualities – which are considerable – and also your limitations.’ She settled back in her chair. ‘John, you know your little adventure in the woods? The time when no one could find you, after your “accident”? It was as plain as plain that you were just begging for attention. I said nothing about it. Perhaps you don’t realise that I have to divide myself into many little pieces to look after you all. And perhaps this application to another school is an exercise in the same vein, a way of making yourself important.’

In a sense I’d never before had a conflict with authority. I’d been indoctrinated by Mum and sensitised by Dad to his withholding of feeling. I’d been tortured by two generations of carers, by Miss Krüger at CRX and Judy at Vulcan: strong hands had held me under the surface of the hospital pool, strong hands had dangled me over the school stair-well. In my time I’d been scolded, roughly hugged and taken under a few wings. I’d had passing battles of will with Granny, which had been invaluable training, but this was actually the first time a whole personality had been nakedly opposed to mine, on
something
like equal terms.

Miss Willis expected the force of what she said, or simply the authority she embodied, to carry the day. To prevail because either she was right or because she was Miss Willis. It was almost intoxicating, to have her voice address me at its deepest, with the Kathleen Ferrier throb giving her an extra authority, and her clean-and-not-really-
like-a
-fat-person’s smell taking me back to the time she broke my fall on the steps.

Of course she was right that I craved attention. She wasn’t stupid. Even in my days of bed rest, with my day-dreams of having a steel ball in the room, which I could move around with the force of my mind – the whole point of the fantasy was that everyone would be impressed. Not that I had powers, but that everyone knew about it. In the absence of acclaim a steel ball was a duller toy than most.

The Little Mermaid had always been one of my favourite stories, but I always bridled at the bargain she made, to walk in agony and have no one know her suffering. I had no objection to suffering in silence, as long as everyone knew about it.

The weather-vane of Marion’s rhetoric changed quarter. I had stood up to the breezes of reproach and wheedling, now she would try some colder blasts. Her voice took on a hard edge. ‘In a school other than this, you would not be treated with understanding. You would be humiliated and mocked. Never accepted. I have watched you spread your wings here, with our help, but that doesn’t mean I must watch as you throw yourself off a cliff and try to join a flock which will peck you to death. You can’t judge the world outside by our splendid ABs. It can be a cruel place, and weakness is no protection. Weakness can even be an incitement to cruelty.’

Of course, it spoiled her case that the world over which she ruled was crueller than she knew. Judy Brisby hadn’t been detected in her various assaults. She had left the school as an unspotted professional, as a loving wife and mother-to-be.

In fact there was only one person reprimanded for bullying in my years at Vulcan, as far as I know, and that was me. We were used to our own little tortures. Chinese Burns were common currency, given and received without much comment. I was almost proud of the first one I got. It was painful but also a mark of belonging, like a phantom bracelet. Eventually I found someone even weaker than me, a worthy person to receive an amateurish sort of Chinese Burn in his turn (my hands not really being up to the task of twisting the skin of the wrists in two directions at once) – and I got a proper scolding for it. It even turned up on my report: ‘John really must stop bullying boys weaker than himself.’ Unfair, unfair! The action was technically difficult and it was quite a feat to manage it at all. But oh no, suddenly grassing people up is perfectly all right and I’m a menace to society. Never mind that no one ever got a word in their reports about the Chinese Burns they’d given me.

And after all, as the whole Skull of Doom episode showed, there was a little nerve of cruelty unknown to Marion herself which pulsed in her from time to time. If she was
in loco parentis
for all the children, then by letting little Stevie Templeton be frightened until his athetoid twitching became frantic and he cut his head against the metal of his wheelchair, she was responsible for the hurt he suffered. She was hurting him as directly as if she had knocked his head against the metal herself.

‘It’s natural, John, and even admirable that your reach should exceed your grasp …’ She faltered for a moment, realising the ineptness of her chosen words. I looked down at my hands, which got equally poor marks for reaching and grasping, and then gazed defiantly up at her, so that she went quite red. There’s startling imagery dozing in all our expressions – I mean, ‘flogging a dead horse’. Why ever not? It’s the only sort of horse I’d condone flogging. Language is full of these
pitfalls
, and I can’t pretend they’ve ever bothered me, really.

Arms and legs. They’re basic, aren’t they? The last thing I want is for people to hamstring the language, put their words in shackles, out of a misplaced and cringing tact. Still, I wasn’t going to let that stop me using any weapon I could find, in the struggle with a benefactor who was blocking my way so that she could help me indefinitely, and heal her own wounds in the process.

‘One more thing, John,’ she said. ‘I’ve been looking through your academic record. Perhaps we’ve made a mistake. That does happen. Very rarely. Or perhaps it is you that is mistaken.’ She made a show of shuffling the papers on the desk she had somehow taken over from Raeburn. ‘Did you in fact pass your eleven-plus?’

Her cheeks might wobble but her voice was strong. Even so I began to see that her eyes behind their glasses looked small and frightened. I could hear her breathing. She wasn’t puffing out her cheeks, as I would do when I imitated her for the entertainment of the Blue Dorm, but she was making little panting noises, as if she was an invalid with damaged lungs trying to blow out a birthday candle set too far away from her.

I felt guiltily sorry for her at that moment. I had to remind myself what she was actually doing. The candle in front of her was my hope for a normal education. That’s what she was doing her best to
extinguish
. ‘No, Miss Willis, I didn’t. But Burnham Grammar School will take me anyway. It’s all arranged. I have a letter from my parents.’

Then her voice changed, becoming rougher but also, horribly, softer. ‘John, I can’t let you go,’ she said. ‘I can’t let you go.’ Remembering what she had said at Raeburn’s engagement party, I understood that she was no longer speaking as an educationalist with special expertise but as something else. Call it an educationalist scorned. There came a point where she wanted to hang on to me, to keep me near, and not necessarily for my own good. If I moved to a main-stream school, that was something other than a success story and a vindication of the Vulcan ideal. It had become a personal
rejection
, and she had had quite enough in that line.
John, I can’t let you go
was like a melancholy reprise of
Alan, don’t do this to me
. Dido again. Dido made monstrous by grief. The proud Carthaginian queen
stepping
onto the pyre and holding me in her arms as it was lit.

Then she recovered her poise, and the vocal softness disappeared for good. ‘One thing I will say. If you go to this school where they know nothing about you, you will come crawling back to me on your hands and knees. You will beg to be taken back where you belong.’

‘Then I will come crawling back to you on my hands and knees. And when I do you can say whatever you like.’

It gave me courage that she still didn’t know about Kim and Dagmar Bosch from Oberammergau, and their trysts in the library. She didn’t know that Luke Squires met Terence Wilberforce on the go-cart track any night when there wasn’t rain. And hang it all, after the trip to Amsterdam, she had told us to do paintings of the tulip fields using a ruler, if you please! I had ignored her and been held up to shame. ‘But Miss Willis,’ I had said, ‘there are no straight lines in nature.’

‘Allow me to know best, John. I saw any number of straight lines in Holland, and so did you.’ Allow her to know best? Not any more.

Marion tried to regain control of the conversation by dismissing me, saying, ‘You can go now, John.’ I deliberately misunderstood, and said, ‘I know, Miss Willis, that’s just what I’ve been saying.’ I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of ordering me out of the room. The battle was won, and this was just a skirmish over who had the right to dismiss who. Or as she might have put it, asserting her authority to the last – who had the right to dismiss
whom
, John. I’d go in my own good time. It turned out I was the one with the mobility after all.

I closed my eyes in a curious state of peace. I no longer even felt like a pupil of the school. I was already for all practical purposes an old boy. Miss Willis might be sitting there in front of me, holding her head in her hands, but in reality I had already left. I was reverting to a technique older than anything I’d learned at Vulcan, the almost subliminal mode of movement that had served me so well at CRX. I could see a door opening on the far side of Miss Willis, glowing with possibilities, and I had only to get to it. All I had to do was to start taking tiny steps and I would somehow arrive at my destination before anyone really noticed that I was on my way. It had worked any number of times in the past. The length of my ‘stride’, to call it that, might only be an inch and a half, and for any amount of time I seemed to be getting nowhere. Yet the next time Marion Willis looked up I would be long gone, tottering securely into a corridor full of
possibilities
, where every door was very promisingly marked
Private
or
No
Admittance. Absolutely no unauthorised personnel
.

Danger. Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted.

Keep Out. This Means You.