Black Swan Green (33 page)

‘“Savages”?’

‘Thanks, sir.’ (Wished I had the guts to press my two Ball Pentels against my eyeballs and head-slam the desk.
Anything
to get away.) ‘“
We’re English; and the English are best at everything
.” Er…“
Ssso we’ve got to do the right things
.”’

Miss Lippetts walked in and saw what’d happened. ‘Thank you, Jason.’

No ‘How come
he
gets off so lightly?’ rippled round the class.

‘Please, miss?’ Gary Drake stuck up his hand.

‘Gary?’

‘This part’s
brill
. Honest, I’m on the edge of my seat. Mind if
I
read?’

‘Glad you’re enjoying it, Gary. Go ahead.’

Gary Drake cleared his throat. ‘“
Ralph – I’ll split up the choir – my hunters, that is – into groups, and we’ll be responsible for keeping the fire going
—”’ Gary Drake read with exaggerated polish, just to contrast with how he read next. ‘
This generosssity brought a ssss-SSS-patter
—’ (He got me. Boys were sniggering. Girls were looking round at me. My head burst into flames of shame.) ‘–
of applause from the boys, s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-so
—’

‘Gary Drake!’

He was all innocent. ‘Miss?’

Kids turned round to stare at Gary Drake, then me.
Is Taylor the School Stutterer going to cry
? A label’d been stuck on me that I’ll
never
peel off.

‘Do you believe you are being amusing, Gary Drake?’

‘Sorry, miss.’ Gary Drake smiled without smiling. ‘Must’ve picked up a nasty stutter from somewhere…’

Christopher Twyford and Leon Cutler shook with stifled laughter.

‘You two can shut up!’ They did. Miss Lippetts’s no idiot. Sending Gary Drake to Mr Nixon’d’ve turned his joke into today’s main headline. If it isn’t already. ‘That is despicably, fatuously,
ignorantly
weak of you, Gary Drake.’ The rest of the words on page forty-one of
Lord of the Flies
swarmed off the page and buried my face in bees.

Seventh and eighth periods were music with Mr Kempsey, our form teacher. Alastair Nurton’d taken my usual seat next to Mark Badbury so without a word I sat with Carl Norrest, Lord of Lepers. Nicholas Briar and Floyd Chaceley’ve been lepers together so long they’re almost married. Mr Kempsey was still furious with us for the McNamara affair. After we’d chanted, ‘Good afternoon, Mr Kempsey,’ he just wanged us our exercise books like Oddjob throwing his hat in
Goldfinger
. ‘I quite fail to see what is “good” about
this
afternoon, when you have rubbished the founding principle of the comprehensive school. Namely, that the putative crème de la crème impart their enrichening essence to the milkier orders. Avril Bredon, distribute the textbooks. Chapter three. It is Ludwig van Beethoven’s turn to be hanged, drawn and quartered.’ (We don’t actually make music in music. All we’ve done this term is copy out chunks from
Lives of the Great Composers
. While we’re doing this, Mr Kempsey unlocks the record player and puts on an LP of that week’s composer. The poshest voice on earth introduces that composer’s greatest hits.) ‘Remember,’ warned Mr Kempsey, ‘to rewrite the biography
in your own words
.’ Teachers’re always using that ‘in your own words’. I hate that. Authors knit their sentences tight. It’s their job. Why make us unpick them, just to put then back together more shonkily? How’re you s’posed to say
capelmeister
if you can’t say
capelmeister
?

Nobody messes about much in Mr Kempsey’s class, but today the mood was like somebody’d died. The only minor distraction was Holly Deblin, the new girl, asking if she could go to the sickbay for a bit. Mr Kempsey just pointed at the door and mouthed, ‘Go.’ Third-year girls’re allowed to go to the sickbay or toilets much more freely than boys. Duncan Priest says it’s to do with periods. Periods’re pretty mysterious. Girls don’t talk about them when boys’re around. Boys don’t joke about them much, in case we give away how little we know.

Beethoven going deaf was the high point of his chapter in
Lives of the Great Composers
. Composers spent half their lives walking across Germany to work for different archbishops and archdukes. The other half must’ve been lost in church. (Bach’s choirboys used his original manuscripts to wrap their sandwiches in for years after he’d died. That’s the only other thing I’ve learnt in music this term.) I polished Beethoven off in forty minutes, long before the rest of the class.

Moonlight Sonata
, the poshest voice on earth told us,
is one of the best-loved pieces in any pianist’s repertoire. Composed in 1782, the sonata evokes the moon over calm, peaceful waters after the passing of a storm
.

A poem nagged as moonlight Sonata played. Its title’s ‘Souvenirs’. Wished I could’ve netted the lines in my rough book, but I daredn’t, not in class, not on a day like today. (And now it’s all gone ’cept for ‘Sunlight on waves, drowsy tinsel’. Don’t write it down and you’re doomed.)

‘Jason Taylor.’ Mr Kempsey’d noticed my attention’d left the textbook. ‘An errand for you.’

School corridors’re sort of sinister during classtime. The noisiest spaces’re now the silentest. Like a neutron bomb’s vaporized human life but left all the buildings standing. These drowned voices you hear aren’t coming from classrooms, but through the partitions between life and death. The shortest route to the staffroom was the Quad, but I took the longer way, via the Old Gym. Teachers’ errands’re in-between times where no one can hassle you, like Free Parking in Monopoly. I wanted to spin this space out. My feet clomped over the same worn boards boys did somersaults on before they went off to the First World War to be gassed. Stacked chairs block off one wall of the Old Gym, but the other wall’s got a wooden frame you can climb. For some reason, I wanted to peer out through the window at the top. It was a minor risk. If I heard footsteps I’d just jump down.

Once you’re up there, mind, it’s higher than it looks.

Years of muck’d greyed the glass.

The afternoon’d turned to heavy grey.

Too heavy and too grey to not turn into rain. Moonlight Sonata orbited out past the tenth planet. Rooks huddled on a drainpipe, watching the school buses lumber into the big front yard. Bolshy, bored and bargey, those rooks, like the Upton Punks hanging out by their war memorial.

Once a Maggot
, mocked Unborn Twin,
always a Maggot
.

Points behind my eyes ached with the coming rain.

Friday’d come round, sure. But the moment I get home, the weekend’ll begin to die and Monday’ll creep nearer, minute by minute. Then it’ll be back to five more days like today, worse than today, far worse than today.

Hang yourself
.

‘Lucky for
you
,’ a girl’s voice said, and I nearly fell fifteen feet to a nest of fractured bones, ‘I’m not a teacher on patrol, Taylor.’

I peered down at Holly Deblin peering up. ‘S’pose so.’

‘What’re
you
doing out of class?’

‘Kempsey sent me to get his whistle.’ I clambered down. Holly Deblin’s only a girl but she’s as tall as me. She throws the javelin farther than anyone. ‘He’s doing the bus queues today. Are you feeling better?’

‘Just needed to lie down for a bit. How about you? Giving you a hard time, aren’t they? Wilcox, Drake and Brose and them.’

No point denying it, but admitting it made it realer.

‘They’re dickheads, Taylor.’

Darkness in the Old Gym smoothed away Holly Deblin’s edges.

‘Yeah.’ They
are
dickheads, but how does that help me?

Was it then that I heard the first tappings of rain?

‘You’re not a maggot. Don’t let dickheads decide what you are.’

Past the clock where bad kids’re made to stand, past the secretary’s office where form captains fetch the registers, past the storeroom, a long passageway leads to the staffroom. My footsteps got slower as I got nearer. Its steel door was half open today. Low chairs, I saw. Mr Whitlock’s black wellingtons. Cigarette smoke billowed out like fog in Jack the Ripper’s London. But just this side of the door, there’s a hive of cubby-holes where the more important teachers’ve got their own desks.

‘Yes?’ Mr Dunwoody blinked at me, dragonishly. A going-brown chrysanthemum leant over his shoulder. The art teacher’s scarlet book was called
Story of the Eye
by Georges Bataille. ‘As the title suggests,’ Mr Dunwoody saw the book’d caught my attention, ‘
it
’s about the history of opticians. What are
you
about?’

‘Mr Kempsey asked me to come and get his whistle, sir.’

‘As in, “
Whistle, and I’ll come to you, my lad
”?’

‘I s’pose so, sir. He told me it’s on his desk. On a paper of interest.’

‘Or perhaps,’ Mr Dunwoody stuck a Vick’s nasal inhaler up his large red nose and took an almighty sniff, ‘Mr Kempsey’s getting out of teaching while his ticker is not yet dicky. Off to Snowdonia, to herd sheep? With Shep, his border collie? “Oh Give Me a Cot in the Land of the Mountains”? Could
this
be why he sent you for his whistle?’

‘I think he’s just doing the bus queues, sir.’

‘End cell. Under the tender gaze of the Holy Lamb.’ Mr Dunwoody got back to
Story of the Eye
without another word.

I walked down the empty hive. Desks come to resemble their owners, the way dogs do. Mr Inkberrow’s desk’s all neat stacks and piles. Mr Whitlock’s is grubby with seed-trays and copies of
Sporting Life
. Mr Kempsey’s cubby-hole has a leather chair, an anglepoise reading lamp like my dad’s and a picture of Jesus holding a lantern by an ivy door. On his desk was
Plain Prayers for a Complicated World
,
Roget’s Thesaurus
(Dean Moran’s dad calls it ‘Roger’s Brontosaurus’),
Delius: As I knew him
. Mr Kempsey’s whistle was exactly where he’d told me. Under the whistle was a thin stack of Xeroxes of Xeroxes. I folded the top Xerox up and slipped it into my blazer pocket. Just because.

‘Hunting for a needle in the ocean?’ Mr Dunwoody’s head appeared round his partition. ‘As the Asiatics might say? In lieu of a haystack?’

I thought he’d seen me nick the sheet. ‘Sir?’

‘Pearls before swine? Or a whistle on a desk?’

I dangled the whistle at Mr Dunwoody. ‘Just found it, sir…’

‘Wherefore dalliest thou? With the speed of a wingèd monkey, convey it presently to its rightful owner. Huzzah!’

First-years were playing conkers in the queue for the Black Swan Green bus. In Miss Throckmorton’s I was skill at conkers. Us third-years can’t play conkers, though, ’cause it’s too gay. It’s maimball or nothing. But at least the conkers was something to watch. Wilcox’d made it risky even to talk to Jason Maggot, School Stutterkid. After Mr Kempsey’d herded the Birtsmorton lot on to their bus, he blew his whistle for the Black Swan Green kids. I wonder if he meant for me to take that sheet. When you decide Mr Kempsey’s all right, he acts like a prat. When you decide Mr Kempsey’s a prat, he acts all right.

Three rows from the front’s too girly a seat for a third-year boy, but sitting near Wilcox’s squad at the back’d’ve been
asking
for it. Middle-ranking kids trooped past the spare seat next to me. Robin South, Gavin Coley, Lee Biggs didn’t even look at me. Oswald Wyre shot a ‘
Maggot!
’ at me. Across the playground a bunch of kids by the bike sheds’d turned to puppet shadows in the mist.

‘
Christ!
’ Dean Moran sat by me. ‘What a day!’

‘All right, Dean.’ I felt miserable I felt so grateful.

‘Tell yer what, Jace, that Murcot’s a bloody
nutter
! In woodwork just now, right, a plane flew over and what does Murcot yell at the top of his lungs? “Hit the deck, boys! It’s the goddam Jerries!” Honest to God, we all had to get down on our hands and knees! D’yer reckon he’s going senile?’

‘Could be.’

Norman Bates the driver started the engine and our bus moved off. Dawn Madden, Andrea Bozard and some other girls started singing ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’. By the time the bus got to Welland Cross, fog was closing in thick.

‘I was going to invite yer over this Saturday,’ said Moran. ‘Dad got a video recorder off this bloke in a pub in Tewkesbury.’

Despite my problems, I was impressed. ‘VHS or Betamax?’

‘Betamax, of course! VHS’s going extinct. Problem is, when we got the video out of its box yesterday, half its insides was missing.’

‘What did your dad do?’

‘Drove straight over to Tewkesbury to have it out with the bloke who’d sold it him. Problem is, the man’d vanished.’

‘Could anyone at the pub help?’

‘No. The pub’d vanished an’ all.’

‘Vanished? How can a pub vanish?’

‘Sign in the window. “We have ceased trading”. Padlocks on the doors and windows. FOR SALE sign. That’s how a pub vanishes.’

‘Bloody hell.’