Gentlemen & Players (17 page)

Of course I already knew the man was a writer. He has that look; the slight complacency of the casual observer, content to enjoy the view because he knows he won’t be staying long. What I hadn’t guessed was how much he’d already seen; the tiffs, the rivalries, the little secrets of the Common Room dynamic. There were pages of it; closely written in handwriting so small that it was scarcely legible; character studies, sketches, overheard remarks, gossip, history, news.

I scanned the pages, straining my eyes to decipher the minuscule script.
Fallowgate
was mentioned; and
Peanuts
, and
Favorites
. There was a little of our school history—I saw the names
Snyde
,
Pinchbeck
, and
Mitchell
alongside a folded newspaper cutting of that sad old tale. Next to that, a photocopied snippet from a St. Oswald’s official school photograph, a color snapshot of another school’s Sports Day—boys and girls sitting cross-legged on the grass—and a bad portrait of John Snyde, looking criminal, as most men do when seen from the front page of a newspaper.

Several more pages, I saw, were given over to cartoons, caricatures for the most part. Here was the Head, rigid and glacial, the Don Quixote to Bishop’s Sancho. There was Bob Strange, a hybrid half-human wired into his computer terminal. My own Anderton-Pullitt was there in goggles and flying helmet; Knight’s schoolboy crush on a new teacher was mercilessly exposed; Miss Dare portrayed as a bespectacled, bestockinged schoolmarm with Scoones as her growling rottweiler. Even I was included, hunchbacked and black-robed, swinging from the Bell Tower with Kitty, a plumpish Esmerelda, under my arm.

That
made me smile; but there was some unease in it too. I suppose I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for Kitty Teague. All aboveboard, of course, you know—I just never realized it was so damned
obvious
. I wondered too whether Kitty had seen it.

Damn the man; I thought to myself. Hadn’t I known from the first that he was an upstart? And yet I’d liked him. Like him still, if truth be told.

R. Straitley: Latin. Devoted Old Boy of St. Oswald’s. Sixties; smoker; overweight; cuts his own hair. Wears the same brown tweed jacket with the elbow patches every day
(well,
that
‘s a lie, smarty-pants; I wear a blue suit to Speech Days and funerals);
hobbies include baiting the management and flirting with the French teacher. Boys hold him in unexpected affection
(you’re forgetting Colin Knight);
albatross around B. Strange’s neck. Harmless.

Well, I like that. Harmless, forsooth!

Still, it could be worse; under Penny Nation’s entry I read
Poisonous do-gooder
, and under Isabelle Tapi,
French tart
. You can’t deny the man has a turn of phrase. I would have read on; but at that moment the bell for registration went, and I put it in my desk drawer, with some reluctance, hoping to finish it at leisure.

I never did. Returning to my desk at the end of school I found the drawer empty and the notebook gone; at the time I assumed that Keane, who, like Dianne, occasionally shares my room, had found it and taken it back. I never asked him, for obvious reasons; and it was only later, when the scandals began to erupt one after the other, that I thought to make the connection between that little red notebook and the ubiquitous
Mole
, who knew the school so well, and who seemed to have so many insights into our harmless little ways.

9

Friday, 15th October

Another successful week, I think. Not least was my retrieval of that notebook, with its incriminating contents. I believe Straitley may have read some of it, though probably not all. The handwriting is too spindly for his old eyes, and besides, if he had drawn any suspicious conclusions, I would have seen it in his manner before now. Still, it would have been unwise to keep the book. I see that; and I burnt the offending item—not without a pang—before it could fall under hostile scrutiny. I may yet have to revisit the problem—but not today. Today I have other concerns to attend to.

The October half-term is upon us already, and I mean to be very busy (I’m not just talking about marking books). No, this week I shall be in school almost every day. I have cleared it with Pat Bishop, who also finds it hard to keep away, and with Mr. Beard, the Head of IT, with whom I have an unofficial arrangement.

All perfectly innocent and aboveboard—after all, my interest in technology is nothing new, and I know from experience that I am best hidden when I am in the open. Bishop approves, of course; he doesn’t really know much about computers but supervises me in his avuncular way, popping out of his office every once in a while to see if I need help.

I am not a brilliant student. A couple of elementary faux pas have established me as willing, if not especially able, which allows Bishop to feel superior whilst giving me extra cover, should I ever need it. I doubt I shall; if my presence is ever questioned at a later date, I know I can rely on Pat to say that I simply didn’t have the expertise.

Every member of St. Oswald’s staff has an e-mail address. This consists of their first two or three initials followed by the address of the school Web site. In theory, every member of staff should check his e-mail twice a day, in case of an urgent memo from Bob Strange, but in practice, some never do. Roy Straitley and Eric Scoones are among these; many more use the system but have neglected to personalize their mailboxes and have kept the default password (PASSWORD) to access their mail. Even the ones, like Bishop, who imagine themselves to be more computer literate are predictable enough: Bishop himself uses the name of his favorite sportsman, and even Strange, who should know better, has a series of easy-to-guess codes (his wife’s maiden name, his date of birth, and so on).

Not that I ever had to do much guessing. Fallow, who used the facilities every night, kept a list of user codes in a notebook in the Porter’s Lodge, along with a box of disks (material downloaded from the Internet) that no one had bothered to investigate. By retracing his steps (under a different user identity), I managed to lay quite a convincing trail. Better still, by disabling the firewall on the school’s computer network for a few minutes, and then sending a carefully prepared file attachment to [email protected], from one of my Hotmail addresses, I was able to introduce a simple virus designed to lie dormant in the system before awakening into dramatic action a couple of weeks later.

Not the most exciting kind of spadework, I know. All the same, I enjoyed it. This evening I thought I might allow myself a little celebration; a night off, a couple of drinks at the Thirsty Scholar. That turned out to be a mistake; I hadn’t realized how many colleagues—and pupils—frequented the place. I was only halfway through my first drink when I saw a little group of them come in—I recognized Jeff Light, Gerry Grachvogel, and Robbie Roach, the long-haired geographer, with a couple of seventeen-or eighteen-year-olds who might have been St. Oswald’s sixth-formers.

I shouldn’t have been surprised—it’s no secret that Roach likes to hang out with the boys. Light too. Grachvogel, on the other hand, looked slightly furtive, but then he always does, and he at least has the sense to know (as Straitley puts it) that no good ever comes of getting overfriendly with the troops.

I was tempted to stay. There was no reason to be shy; but the thought of socializing with them, of
letting my hair down
, as the ghastly Light would have put it,
and having a couple of bevvies
, was distinctly unpleasant. Thankfully, I was sitting by the door and was able to make my exit, quick and unobserved, as they made their way toward the bar.

I recognized Light’s car, a black Probe, in the alley beside the pub, and toyed with the idea of putting its side window through; but there might be security cameras in the street, I thought, and it would be pointless to risk exposure on a stupid whim. Instead I walked the long way home—the night was mild, and besides, I’d promised myself another look at Roy Straitley’s fence.

He had already removed the graffiti. I wasn’t surprised; even though he couldn’t actually see it from his house, its simple presence must have irked him, just as it irked him that the boys who had invaded his garden might return. Perhaps I’ll arrange it—just to see his face—but not tonight. Tonight I deserve better.

And so I went home to my chintz-hung room, opened my second bottle of champagne (I have a case of six, and I mean to see them all empty by Christmas), caught up with a little essential correspondence, then went down to the pay phone outside and made a quick call to the local police, reporting a black Probe (registration LIT 3) driving erratically in the vicinity of the Thirsty Scholar.

It’s the sort of behavior my therapist tends to discourage nowadays. I’m too impulsive, or so she says; too judgmental. I don’t always consider the feelings of others as I should. But there was no risk to me; I did not give my name, and in any case—you know he deserved it. Like Mr. Bray, Light is a braggart; a bully; a natural rule-breaker; a man who genuinely believes that a few pints under his belt make him a better driver. Predictable. They’re all so predictable.

That’s their weakness. The Oswaldians. Light, of course, is a complacent fool; but even Straitley, who is not, shares the same foolish complacency.
Who would dare to attack me? To attack St. Oswald’s
?

Well, gentlemen. I would.

CHECK

1

The summer of my father’s breakdown was the hottest in remembered history. At first it cheered him, as if this were a return to the legendary summers of his childhood, during which, if I was to believe him, he spent the happiest days of his life. Then, as the sun continued remorseless and the grass on St. Oswald’s lawns veered from yellow to brown, he soured and began to fret.

The lawns were his responsibility, of course; and it was one of his duties to maintain them. He set up sprinklers to water the grass, but the area to be covered was too large to be dealt with in this way, and he was obliged to restrict his attentions to the cricket pitch only, while the remainder of the lawns grew bald under the sun’s hot and lidless eye. But that was only one of my father’s concerns. The graffiti artist had struck again, this time in Technicolor; a mural, fully six feet square, on the side of the Games Pavilion.

My father spent two days scrubbing it off, then another week repainting the pavilion, and swore that next time, he’d give the little bastard the thrashing of his life. Still the culprit eluded him; twice more, spray-paintings appeared in and around St. Oswald’s, crudely colorful, artistic in their way, both of them featuring caricatures of Masters. My father began to watch the school at night, lying in wait behind the pavilion with a twelve-pack of beers, but still there was no sign of the guilty party, although how he managed to avoid detection was a mystery to John Snyde.

Then there were the mice. Every large building has vermin—St. Oswald’s more than most—but since the end of the summer term, mice had infested the corridors in unusually large numbers. Even I saw them occasionally, especially around the Bell Tower, and I knew that their breeding would have to be checked; poison laid down and the dead mice removed before the new term began and the parents had chance to complain.

It incensed my father. He was convinced that boys had left food in their lockers; blamed the carelessness of the school cleaners; spent days opening and checking every locker in the school with mounting rage—but no success.

Then there were the dogs. The hot weather affected them as it did my father, making them lethargic by day and aggressive in the evenings. By night their owners—who had usually omitted to walk them in the sweltering daytime—now loosed them on the waste ground at the back of St. Oswald’s, and they ran in packs there, barking and tearing up the grass. They had no respect for boundaries; despite my father’s attempts to keep them out, they would squeeze through the fence into St. Oswald’s playing fields and shit on the newly sprinkled cricket pitch. They seemed to have an instinct for choosing the spot that would annoy my father most; and in the mornings he would have to drag himself around the fields with his pooper-scooper, arguing furiously with himself and chugging at a can of flat beer.

Infatuated as I was with Leon, it took me some time to understand—and even longer to care—that John Snyde was losing his mind. I had never been very close to my father, nor had I ever found him easy to read. Now his face was a perpetual slab, its most common expression one of bewildered rage. Once, perhaps, I had expected something more. But this was the man who had thought to solve my social problems with karate lessons. Faced with this infinitely more delicate situation, what could I possibly hope from him now?

Dad, I’m in love with a boy called Leon.

I didn’t think so.

All the same, I tried. He’d been young once, I told myself. He’d been in love, in lust, whatever. I brought him beer from the fridge; made tea; sat for hours in front of his favorite TV shows (
Knight Rider
,
The Dukes of Hazzard
) in the hope of something other than blankness. But John Snyde was sinking fast. Depression enfolded him like a crazy quilt; his eyes reflected nothing but the colors from the screen. Like the rest of them, he barely saw me; at home, as at St. Oswald’s, I had become the Invisible Man.

Then, two weeks into that hot summer holiday, a double catastrophe struck. The first was my own fault; opening a window onto the roof of the school I managed to trip the burglar alarm, and it sounded. My father reacted with unexpected speed, and I was nearly caught in the act. As it was, I got back to the house and was just about to replace the passkeys, when along came my father, and saw me with the keys in my hand.

I tried to bluff my way out of it. I’d heard the alarm, I said; and noticing that he had forgotten the keys, had been on my way to deliver them. He didn’t believe me. He had been jumpy that day, and he’d already suspected the keys were missing. I had no doubt I was in for it now. There was no way out of the house except past my father, and from the expression on his face, I knew I didn’t have a chance.

It wasn’t the first time he’d hit me, of course. John Snyde was the champion of the roundhouse punch, a blow which connected maybe three times out of ten and which felt like being hit with a petrified log. Usually I dodged, and by the time he saw me again he had sobered up, or forgotten why I had angered him in the first place.

This time was different. First, he was sober. Second, I had committed the unforgivable offense, a trespass against St. Oswald’s; an open challenge to the Head Porter. For a moment I saw it in his eyes; his trapped rage; his frustration; it was the dogs, the graffiti, the bald patches on the lawn; it was the kids who pointed at him and called him names; it was the monkey-faced boy; it was the unspoken contempt of people like the Bursar and the New Head. I don’t know how many times he punched me, but by the end of it my nose was bleeding, my face was bruised, I was crouching in a corner with my arms over my head, and he was standing over me with a dazed expression on his big face, his hands outspread like a stage murderer’s.

“My God. Oh my God. Oh my God.”

He was talking to himself, and I was too preoccupied with my busted nose to care, but at last I finally dared to lower my arms. My stomach hurt, and I felt as if I was about to be sick, but I managed to keep the feeling at bay.

My father had moved away and was sitting at the table, his head in his hands. “Oh God. I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” he repeated, though whether this was addressed to me or to the Almighty, I could not tell. He did not look at me as I slowly stood up. Instead he spoke into his hands, and although I kept my distance, knowing how volatile he could be, I sensed that something had broken in him.

“I’m sorry,” he said, now shaken by sobs. “I can’t take it, kid. I just can’t—fucking—take it.” And with that he finally brought it out, the last and most terrible blow of that miserable afternoon, and as I listened, first in astonishment, then in growing horror, I realized that I
was
going to be sick after all, and rushed out into the sunlight, where St. Oswald’s marched interminably across the blue horizon and the sun trepanned my forehead and the scorched grass smelled like Cinnabar and all the time the stupid birds sang and sang and would not stop singing.