The Rye Man (24 page)

He couldn't go home – he knew that – but there was nowhere left to look, nowhere he could even begin to imagine she might be. A car came round a corner and he fumbled clumsily to dip the headlights. He tried to think of his own childhood, of the options which he might have considered, but he couldn't pretend to himself that he had any understanding of how she felt or thought. And as he admitted that, his efforts to help her, to know her, seemed suddenly paltry, half-hearted. He had seen her as a symptom of what was wrong in Reynolds' school, and if he was truly honest, as a cause he could champion, a wrong he could publicly right. With a shiver he remembered what Emma had said about using children and he wondered again why he had said nothing about the
wreath
of bruising. Because he wasn't sure? Because he was frightened of being wrong and in the end more frightened of the consequences for himself than for the child? Each thought was sharpened by a sudden sense of shame. But it was still not too late. The credit he had accrued from that moment in the past, the years of caring for children – these, too, had to count for something.

On impulse he drove towards the town. He could see the link of orange lights somewhere in the distance. She was a child who lived in a world which was separate and unshared with anyone. Perhaps inside that world there was a place she felt safe, somewhere she would go to hide, to be invisible to the things that hurt her. He thought of the day he had discovered the copse overlooking Maguire's place, had climbed into the swaying canopy of flickering light and shade. To be invisible and safe – that was something she would clutch close like a secret. Small and safe, watching the world at a distance, breathing the stillness. Perhaps she had such a place and perhaps she was safe in her sanctuary, waiting for him to come.

He stopped the car some way from the school and walked to it in the shadows of the hedge. Across the road the windows of his caretaker's house were curtained and dead, but he hurried across the playground and unlocked the front door as quickly and quietly as he could using the torch. He couldn't risk switching on the lights. From outside the sodium lights lining the road speared orange shafts through windows. There was the familiar smell of school but heavily laced with disinfectant and polish. Only the absence of human noise made the moment strange, but the building seemed to creak and rustle with sounds that had no explanation. He could hear, too, the tick of the clock in the secretary's office, the stretch of distant
pipes.
It suddenly seemed foreign to him, the corridors ahead lifeless and flat like some field of stubble.

His shoes squeaked on the tiled floor as he crossed the foyer and then he stepped on some dried-up leaves which had fallen from the display boards. He shone the torch up at them, saw the frame of brittle leaves and shrivelled berries. Some of the backing paper had loosened and sagged forward. Part of a firework had flapped free, revealing the cereal packet which formed its insides. It would soon be time to take it all down. He remembered the way the bare boards had looked and knew he would be faced with a constant battle to keep them covered with new work. Everything that represented a change from what the school had grown accustomed to would require the expenditure of time and energy. Everything would have to be pushed, nothing would roll forward of its own momentum. He had lost Laura Fulton and Fiona Craig and that had weakened his position, left him without a solid base on which to build. Some of his ideas would have to be put on hold, a few even abandoned. He fingered the bruise on his cheek and suddenly felt tired in the face of the struggle ahead of him.

His office brought no sense of comfort, the decoration provided by his personal memorabilia a spurious attempt to generate a sense of ownership. He shone the torch across the desk, lighting up the sliding pile of unopened mail. Some day soon he would cart it all out to the incinerator. He sat at his desk and listened to the strange pulse of sounds that came from far-off corners of the school. They made him shiver. He remembered the first morning he had sat there and listened to the noises outside as hundreds of children had scampered to their first class, and the feeling of loneliness that had brought. Trying to focus his mind again on the child he went to the filing cabinet and pulled out the manilla folder that bore her name, but the meagre lines of information created
no
image of her in his head nor produced any new ideas. He found it hard to visualise her face, to form any precise image, and he wished the folder contained a photograph. There was always something unformed about her, some pale absence of feature which made her blend with the background, bleached her indistinguishable from her surroundings. Only her eyes, only the blue of her eyes. He clutched at that memory, pulling it close to his consciousness, staring into it like the children had stared into the rock pool. It gave him a new sense of urgency, scattered the welling self-pity.

His steps in the corridor sounded loud and intrusive. He ran his hand lightly along the wall as he walked, his fingers feeling the pitted surface of the plaster. Past the closed doors of classrooms, past a frieze of the sea which Mrs Douglas's class had completed some weeks earlier. Blue paper waves, a yellow crust of sand, white chalk squiggles of birds, cardboard fish – all enclosed by a frame of real shells. He fanned the light across it and as he did so his hand caressed the contours of the shell he carried in his pocket. He remembered the sky and sea merging in the gloom, the silhouettes of the children perched on the rocks, the only light where the waves broke in jagged tatters of white.

He opened Vance's classroom with the master key. The room seemed smaller now, the geometric patterns on the back wall so close he felt he could reach out and touch them. The poster of Mozart, the neat piles of books. Vance's room. The children in silent rows listening to the music which cut them off from each other and from themselves. He could hear the music in his head as he stood in front of the empty desks. It flowed coldly into the corners and crevices and then contracted into the single solitary beat of the metronome which sat on Vance's desk. He wanted to shout, to smash it into silence.
And
then he swore – a disconnected, meaningless orison of words, linked only by his need to stifle all other sounds.

He walked down the narrow row where her desk sat at the back of the room, her tongue peeping out of her mouth as she tried to keep inside the lines, the crayon clumsy and awkward in her hand. He stopped where he had stood that first history lesson and felt the stiffness of her body to his touch. He knelt down in the darkness at the edge of the desk and tried to look into her eyes, to look through them and catch some glimpse of what world lay beyond. He held on to the stanchions, the metal cold against his skin. The smell of urine, a blue biro streak like a vein on her cheek. But still she had no face, no precise expression or feature, like a map without contours or scale. Only her eyes were clear to him. He remembered her mother's face pressed against the glass of the porch, his own splintered reflection moving like a ghost across the mirror in Maguire's place. Tracing templates on to paper. Colouring them yellow for gold, printing her initials on the blankness of the page. The marks of her mother's hands hanging frozen in the glass like prints in the snow.

He sat on the wooden chair, his coat trailing the ground, and pointed the torch at the board. A frieze of perfectly formed lettering scripted across its top. Friday's date in the top corner. He moved the beam to the wooden units of shelving at the side of the board where text and exercise books were stacked. A neat pile of manilla folders. He moved the torch on then moved it back. A set of class folders. His knee clipped the top of the desk as he stood up and made his way towards them. Their names were printed in the top right corner and each one was devoid of decoration or graffiti. Only the occasional bruised grubbiness indicated that these were used by children. He flicked through them, spilling some on to the floor, until he found hers near the bottom of the pile. He carried it to
Vance's
desk and sat down, holding it carefully as if it was his first link with the child.

Inside was a jumble of pages, some folded in on themselves, others creased and crumpled. He lifted each one out, smoothing the folds flat and set them in rows across the desk. Pages of large, loosely formed writing which slipped off the narrow blue lines and sloped away towards the edges of the page. Pages pulled from a colouring book and crudely shaded in. Drawings in thick waxy crayons. He tried to sort them into some chronological order but there seemed no connection between any of them. And nowhere could he see any sign of Vance ever having looked at anything or written any kind of response. He cursed him aloud, bursting the words through the tight clench of his teeth. He read the written pages carefully but mostly they consisted of paragraphs copied from some reading book, interspersed with exercises where she had to form the plural of words or change the tense of a verb. There was nothing personal, no expression of feelings or write-ups of events which had taken place. There was nothing which revealed anything about her life, no clues to what existed in her head. He started to replace them in the folder, shuffling them neatly like a pack of cards, then gathered up the pages of drawings. He was about to close the flap of the folder when he paused and held the torch close to the waxed crayon marks, then pulled it back to encompass all the pages. There was a similar pattern to them, similar colours. He propped them up against the book rack at the front of the desk and tried to make sense of them. Trees – they were drawings of trees, leaning in from the edges of the page towards each other. Trees forming an archway, the tops of their branches meeting. He could see it now – brown-barked trees shooting out meshed branches like a spider's web. What was it they overhung – a road, a river? He looked from one to the other. In
one
the colour was green, in another black. It wasn't a river. And then he knew that what he was looking at were drawings of the old railway line.

He tried to fix the geography of the line in his head, to remember the direction it had taken them that Sunday morning when they had discovered Maguire's place. He took it slowly and calmly, working it out step by step, pushing along a straight line in his head which passed close to Maguire's place and then carried on towards the next town. He remembered the barbed wire fence which had blocked their path and then he knew that the line had to pass somewhere close to the boundary of the McQuarrie farm. He switched off the light and sat in the darkness. The wind rattled across the roof and vibrated loose glass in the windows. He had been wrong about Maguire's place, wrong about many things. In his hands he felt the softness of the paper drawings. Perhaps he was wrong now. His breath crystallised in the coldness and he pulled the coat tightly about him. Finding her would change everything, scatter every poisonous spore that had settled and festered on his life, make everything well again. He went to the window and peered out into the night. Even with the torch it would be impossible to move along the line in the darkness and he knew he would have to wait until dawn. But he knew, too, he couldn't go home, could never go home until he had the child in his arms. Locking the door behind him he made his way to the staffroom then switched on the one bar of the electric fire and pulled some of the chairs together. There was a blanket in one of the cupboards where first-aid equipment was stored and he lay down as best he could and pulled the blanket round him. He didn't try to sleep. If he slept he knew he would dream. Sometimes he slipped into a doze and then his head would jerk forward and he would wake again. Sometimes he imagined he heard children's voices in far-off corners
of
the school, the patter of their passing feet in the corridor. The talk he had given on the in-service day swam across his memory like eels, the words sliming and wriggling into constantly changing confusions. Once he glanced at the noticeboard to convince himself that Reynolds' postcard was no longer there, stuck like a royal seal on the ante-chamber of some sarcophagus.

The fire glowed red in the darkness but the thin element pushed little heat into the room and he curled his legs towards his chest. He got up to make himself a coffee but the jar had been locked away somewhere and there was only a bowl of brown-stained sugar and the sour, thickening remains of an old carton of milk. He lay down again and pushed the ends of the blanket under the cushions of the chairs. His mouth felt stale. Then he was aware again of his tiredness and he laid his head down and drifted into a broken, splintered sleep.

It was the cold which woke him and looking at his watch he saw that it was 6 a.m. In about another hour there would be enough light. He stood up and tried to stretch the stiffness out of his legs, then warmed his hands at the fire. He heated the kettle and washed his face, splashing the bleary redness from his eyes and patting the warmth of the water on to the bruise on his cheek. A tiny black crust had formed at the corner of his mouth and he touched it lightly with the tip of his finger. The coldness felt as if it came from his core and he shivered and placed his hands to the fire again. Some of the fluff from the blanket had balled itself on to his coat and he plucked it off as if pulling burrs from a dog. It would be warmer in the car. He switched off the fire and tidied the room, removing all trace of his presence. As he was about to close the door he looked at the blanket, remembered the sheet flapping and thwacking on the line, his father striding towards
it,
knowing what it was for. He folded it carefully, and opening his coat, pushed it inside his jumper.

In the foyer dampness had infiltrated further behind the displays, bubbling the pages like blistered paint. More leaves had fallen to the floor. Outside there was another frost, the steps leading from the school slippery under his feet. He sat in the car and turned on the engine and blower and waited. It seemed to take forever and he started to drive before the windscreen had fully cleared, the white cloud of the exhaust spurting upwards in his wake. Empty roads. Church bells still silent. He put the heater on full as the engine warmed and blew gusts of hot air into the car, then changed the focus of its direction at intervals. A yellow council lorry passed him in the opposite direction and he started as it clattered the side of the car with a hail of grit.