Gentlemen & Players (24 page)

4

Tuesday, 2nd November

My pupil made the papers again. The nationals this time, I am proud to say (of course,
Mole
had a little something to do with that, but he would have found his way in there sooner or later).

The
Daily Mail
blames the parents; the
Guardian
sees a victim; and the
Telegraph
included an editorial on vandalism, and how it should be tackled. All very gratifying: plus Knight’s mother has launched a tearful TV appeal to Colin saying that he isn’t in any trouble and begging him please to come home.

Bishop has been suspended, pending further enquiry. I’m not surprised; what they found on his computer must certainly have helped. Gerry Grachvogel too must have been arrested by now, and very soon, others will follow. The news has hit the school like a bomb—the same time bomb, as it happens, that I put in place during half-term.

A virus to immobilize the system’s defenses. A carefully planted set of Internet links. A log of e-mails sent to and from Knight’s personal station to a hotmail address accessible from the school. A selection of images, mostly stills but with a few interesting webcam clips, sent to a number of staff addresses and downloaded into password-protected files.

Of course, none of this would have come to light if the police had not investigated Colin Knight’s e-mail correspondence. But in these days of Internet chat rooms and virtual predators, it pays to cover all the bases.

Knight fitted the victim profile—a solitary youngster, unpopular at school. I knew they would hit upon the idea sooner or later. As it happens, it was sooner. Mr. Beard helped it along, going through the systems after the crash, and after that it was just a question of following the thread.

The rest is simple. It’s a lesson they still have to learn, the folk of St. Oswald’s; a lesson I learned over fifteen years ago. They are so complacent, these people; so arrogant and naive. They need to understand what I understood in front of the big NO TRESPASSERS sign; that the rules and legislations of the world are all held in place by the same precarious fabric of bluff and complacency; that any rule can be broken; that trespass, like any crime, goes unpunished when there’s no one to see it. It’s an important lesson in any child’s education—and, as my father always said, your education’s the most precious thing in the world.

But why?
I hear you ask. Sometimes I still ask it myself. Why do I do it? Why so dogged, after all these years?

Simple revenge? I only wish it were that easy. But you and I both know that it goes deeper than that. Revenge, I’ll admit, is a part of it. For Julian Pinchbeck, perhaps—for the whingeing, cringing child I was, hiding in the shadows and wishing desperately to be someone else.

But for myself? Nowadays I’m happy with who I am. I’m a solid citizen. I have a job—a job at which I have proved myself unexpectedly talented. I may still be the Invisible Man as far as St. Oswald’s is concerned, but I have refined my role far beyond that of mere impostor. For the first time I wonder if I could stay here longer.

It’s certainly a temptation. I have already made a promising start; and in times of revolution, field officers are quickly promoted. I could be one of those officers. I could have it all—all St. Oswald’s has to offer—bricks, guns, and glory.

Should I take it? I wonder.

Pinchbeck would have jumped at the chance. Of course, Pinchbeck was content, if not happy, to pass unseen. But I am not he.

What do I want, then?

What have I
always
wanted?

If it were simply a matter of revenge, then I could simply have set fire to the main building instead of just the gatehouse and let the whole wasps’ nest go up in flames. I could have put arsenic in the staff tea urn or cocaine in the first eleven’s orange squash. But there wouldn’t have been much fun in that, would there? Anyone can do those things. But no one can do what I have done; no one has
ever
done what I am doing. Still, one thing is missing from the victory tableau. My own face. The face of the artist among the crowd of extras. And as time passes, that small absence looms larger and larger.

Regard.
In English it implies respect and admiration. In French it simply means “a look.” That—to be
seen
—is all I ever wanted; to be more than just a fleeting glimpse, a twelfth man in this game of Gentlemen and Players. Even an invisible man may cast a shadow; but my shadow, grown long over years, has been lost among the dark corridors of St. Oswald’s.

No more. Already it has begun. The name of Snyde has already been mentioned. Pinchbeck too. And before it ends, as St. Oswald’s spirals to its inevitable fate, I promise you:
I will be seen
.

Until then, I am content, for a time, to be an educator. But there are no exams to be passed in my subject. The only test is survival. In this I have a certain experience—Sunnybank Park must have taught me
something
, after all—but I like to think that the rest comes from natural talent. As a pupil of St. Oswald’s, that skill would have been refined out of me, to be replaced by Latin, Shakespeare, and all the comfortable assurances of that very privileged world. For most of all, St. Oswald’s teaches
conformity
; team spirit; playing the game. A game in which Pat Bishop excels; which makes it all the more appropriate that he should be the first real casualty.

As I said before, the way to bring down St. Oswald’s is a blow to the heart, not the Head. And Bishop is the heart of the school; well meaning; honest; respected and loved by boys and staff. A friend to those in trouble; a strong arm to the weak; a conscience; a coach; an inspiration. A man’s man; a sportsman; a gentleman; a man who never delegates a single task but works tirelessly and with joy for the good of St. Oswald’s. He has never married—how could he? Like Straitley, his devotion to the school precludes a normal family life. Base persons might suspect him of having other preferences. Especially in the current climate, where simply the desire to work with children is seen as legitimate cause for suspicion. But Bishop?
Bishop?

No one believes it; and yet the staff room is already curiously divided. Some speak with bold indignation against the unthinkable charge (Straitley amongst them). Others (Bob Strange, the Nations, Jeff Light, Paddy McDonaugh) converse in lowered voices. Scraps of overheard cliché and conjecture—
there’s no smoke without fire; always thought he was too good to be true; a bit too friendly with the boys, know what I mean—
overhang the Common Room like smoke signals.

It’s astonishing, once fear or self-interest has stripped away the veneer of comradeship, how easily one’s friends may turn. I should know; and by now it must have begun to dawn on him too.

There are three
stages of reaction to such an accusation. One, denial. Two, anger. Three, capitulation. My father, of course, acted guilty from the start. Inarticulate; angry; confused. Pat Bishop must have given them a better performance. The Second Master of St. Oswald’s is not a man to be intimidated easily. But the proofs were there, undeniable. Logs of chat room conversations conducted after hours from his password-protected station at St. Oswald’s. A text message sent from Knight’s phone to Bishop’s own mobile on the evening of the fire. Pictures stored in his computer’s memory. Many pictures, all of boys: some showing practices of which Pat, in his innocence, had never even heard.

Of course he denied it. First, with a kind of grim amusement. Then with shock; indignation; rage; and finally a tearful confusion that did more to condemn him than anything else the police had found.

They’d searched his house. A number of photographs had been removed as evidence. School photographs; rugby teams; Bishop’s boys throughout the years, smiling from the walls, all unaware that they would one day be used as evidence. Then there were the albums. Dozens of them, filled with boys; school trips, away matches, last-days-of-term, boys paddling in a Welsh stream, boys bare-chested on a day by the sea, lined up, limbs sleek, hair unkempt, young faces grinning at the camera.

So many boys, they’d said. Wasn’t that a little—
unusual
?

Of course he’d protested. He was a teacher; all teachers keep such things. Straitley could have told them
that
; how year after year no one is forgotten, how certain faces linger unexpectedly. So many boys, passing like the seasons. It was natural to feel a certain nostalgia; more natural still, in the absence of family, to develop affection for the boys one taught, affection and—

What
kind
of affection? Here was the dirt. They sensed it, despite his protests, closing in like hyenas. He denied it with disgust. But they were gentle; spoke of stress; a breakdown; an offer of help.

His computer had been password-protected. Of course, someone else
might
have learned the password. Someone else might have used his computer. Someone else might even have planted the pictures. But the credit card that had been used to pay for them was his. The bank confirmed it; and Bishop was at a loss to explain how his own card could have been used to download hundreds of pictures onto the hard drive of his office PC.

Let us help you, Mr. Bishop.

Ha. I know the type. And now they’d found his Achilles’ heel; not lewdness as they’d suspected, but something infinitely more dangerous—his desire for approval. His fatal eagerness to please.

Tell us about the boys, Pat.

Most people don’t see this in him at first. They see his size, his strength, his giant devotion. Underneath all that he is a pitiful creature; anxious; insecure; running his endless laps in an eternal effort to get ahead. But St. Oswald’s is a demanding master, and its memory is long. Nothing is forgotten, nothing put aside. Even in a career such as Bishop’s there have been failures; errors of judgment. He knows it, as do I; but the boys are his security. Their happy faces remind him that he is a success. Their youth stimulates him—

Dirty laughter from the wings.

No, that wasn’t what he’d meant.

Then what exactly
had
he meant? Crowding round now, like dogs around a bear. Like the little boys around my father as he cursed and swore, his big bear’s rump hanging off the seat of the Mean Machine as they squealed and danced.

Tell us about the boys, Pat.

Tell us about Knight.

“Talk about daft,”
said Roach today in the Common Room. “I mean, how stupid can you get, using your own name and credit cards?”

Though he does not know it, Roach himself is in imminent danger of discovery. Several threads point to him already, and his intimacy with Jeff Light and Gerry Grachvogel is well established. Poor Gerry, so I hear, is already under investigation, although his excessively nervous state makes him a less than reliable witness. Internet pornography has also been found on his workstation, paid for on his credit card.

“I always knew he was a funny bugger,” said Light. “Bit too chummy with the lads, know what I mean?”

Roach nodded. “Just goes to show,” he said. “You can’t be sure of anyone these days.”

How true that was. I followed the conversation from afar, with a certain sense of ironic amusement. The gentlemen of St. Oswald’s are a trusting lot; keys left in jacket pockets slung over chairs; wallets in desk drawers; offices left unlocked. The theft of a credit card number is the work of a moment; no skill is required, and the card can usually be replaced before the owner even suspects it is missing.

Roach’s card was the only one I failed to return—he reported it missing before I could act—but Bishop, Light, and Grachvogel have no such excuse. My one regret is that I failed to catch Roy Straitley—it would have been elegant to have sent them all to hell in the same handbasket—but the sly old fox doesn’t even own a credit card, and besides, I don’t think anyone would believe that he is computer literate enough to even turn on a PC.

Still,
that
can change. We’ve only just begun, he and I, and I’ve planned this game for so long that I really don’t want it all to end too quickly. Already he is poised on the brink of dismissal; he remains only in the absence of the Second Master and because the desperate lack of staff members in his department makes him—but only for the duration of the crisis—indispensable.

It’s his birthday on Friday. Bonfire Night: I imagine he’s dreading it; old people so often do. I should send him a present; something nice to take his mind off the week’s unpleasantness. So far I haven’t had any ideas, but then again, I’ve had a lot on my plate recently.

Give me time.

5

I’ve never liked birthdays since, you know. Toys, cake, paper hats, and friends to tea; for years I longed for those things without ever getting them, just as I longed for St. Oswald’s and its enviable patina of wealth and respectability. For his birthdays, Leon went to restaurants, where he was allowed wine and had to wear a tie. Until I was thirteen I had never even been to a restaurant.
Waste of money
, grumbled John Snyde. Even before my mother left, my birthdays had been hasty occasions; shop-bought cakes and candles that were put away carefully in an old tobacco tin (with last year’s icing-sugar crumbs still clinging to the pastel stubs) for next time. My presents came in Woolworth’s bags, with the labels still on them; we sometimes sang “Happy Birthday to You,” but with the dogged, undemonstrative embarrassment of the working class.

When she left, of course, even that stopped. If he remembered, my father would give me money for my birthdays, telling me
to get summat you really want
—but I had no friends, no cards, no parties. Once Pepsi made an effort; made pizza with birthday candles on it, and a chocolate cake that had sunk along one side. I tried to be grateful, but I knew I’d been cheated; in a way Pepsi’s simple-minded endeavor was even worse than nothing at all. When there was nothing, I could at least forget what day it was.

But that year was different. That August—I remember it still with the supernatural clarity of certain dreams—hot and sweet and smelling of pepper and gunsmoke and resin and grass. A rapturous, terrible, illuminated time; I was two weeks shy of my thirteenth birthday, and my father was planning a surprise.

He hadn’t said so in as many words; but I could sense it. He was excited; nervous; secretive. He veered from moments of extreme irritation at everything I did to bouts of tearful nostalgia, telling me I was growing up; offering me cans of beer; hoping that when I left home one day I wouldn’t forget my poor old dad, who had always done his best for me.

Most surprisingly, he was spending money. John Snyde—who had always been so tightfisted that he had recycled his used cigarette butts, twisting the reclaimed tobacco into skinny roll-ups that he called “Friday freebies”—had finally discovered the joy of retail therapy. A new suit—for interviews, he said. A gold chain with a medallion on it. A whole crate of Stella Artois—this from a man who purported to despise foreign beers—and six bottles of malt whiskey, which he kept in the shed at the back of the gatehouse, under an old candlewick bedspread.

There were scratch cards—dozens of them; a new sofa; new clothes for me (I was growing); underwear; T-shirts; records; shoes.

Then there were the phone calls. Late at night, when he thought I had gone to bed, I could hear him, talking in a low voice for what seemed like hours at a time. For a while I assumed he was calling a sex line—that or he was trying to get back with Pepsi; there was the same air of furtiveness about his whispering. Once, from the landing, I overheard; only a few words, but words that lodged uncomfortably at the back of my mind.

How much, then?
Pause.
All right. It’s for the best. The kid needs a mother.

A mother?

Until then my own mother had written daily. Five years without a word, and now there was no stopping her; we were inundated with postcards, letters, parcels. Most of these remained under my bed, unopened. The air ticket to Paris, booked for September, remained unopened, and I thought that perhaps my father had finally accepted that I wanted nothing more from Sharon Snyde; nothing that might remind me of my life before St. Oswald’s.

Then the letters suddenly stopped. In a way that should have troubled me more; it was as if she were planning something, something that she meant to keep from me.

But days passed and nothing happened. The phone calls ceased—or perhaps my father took more care—in any case I heard nothing else, and my thoughts returned, like a compass point, toward my north.

Leon, Leon, Leon. Never far from my thoughts, Francesca’s departure had found him distant and withdrawn. I tried hard to distract him, but nothing seemed to interest him anymore; he disdained all our usual games; zigzagged continually from manically happy to sullen and uncooperative; and worse, now seemed to resent my intrusion into his solitary time, asking me with sarcasm whether I had any other friends and constantly making fun of me for being younger and less experienced than he was himself.

If only he had known. As far as that went, I was light-years ahead. I had conquered Mr. Bray, after all; soon I was to take my conquests further. But with Leon I had always felt awkward, young, painfully eager to please. He sensed it; and now it made him cruel. He was at that age when everything seems sharp and new and obvious; when adults are immeasurably stupid; when the rule of self overrides all others, and a lethal cocktail of hormones amplifies every emotion to a nightmarish intensity.

Worst of all, he was in love. Nail-bitingly, miserably, cruelly in love with Francesca Tynan, who had gone back to school in Cheshire, and with whom he spoke almost every day in secret on the phone, running up enormous bills that would be discovered—too late—at the end of the quarter.

“Nothing else compares,” he said—not for the first time. He was in his manic phase; soon he would lapse into sarcasm and open contempt. “You can talk about it, like the rest of them, but you don’t know what it’s like. Me, I’ve
done
it. I’ve actually done it. The closest
you
‘ll ever get is a fumble behind the lockers with your friends from junior six.”

I made a face, keeping it light, pretending it was a joke. But he was not. There was something vicious, almost feral about Leon on these occasions; his hair hung over his eyes; his face was pale; a sour smell came from his body; and there was a new scattering of pimples around his sullen mouth.

“I bet you’d like that, queerboy, Queenie, bet you’d like that, wouldn’t you, eh?” He looked at me, and I saw a lethal kind of understanding in his gray eyes.
“Queenie,”
he repeated, with a nasty snigger, and then the wind changed and the sun came out and he was Leon again, talking about a concert he was planning to see; about Francesca’s hair and how it caught the light; a record he had bought; Francesca’s legs and how long they were; the new Bond movie. For a time I could almost believe he really had been joking; then I remembered the chilly intelligence in his eyes and wondered uneasily how I had given myself away.

I should have put an end to it right there and then. I knew that it wasn’t going to get any better. But I was helpless; irrational; torn. Something in me still believed that I could turn him round; that everything could be as it was before. I
had
to believe it; it was the only speck of hope on my otherwise bleak horizon. Besides, he needed me. He wouldn’t see Francesca again until Christmas at least. That gave me five months. Five months to cure him of his obsession, to draw the poison that had infected our comfortable fellowship.

Oh, I had to indulge him. More than was good for him, I suppose. However, there’s nothing quite so vicious as a lover, unless you count the terminally ill, with whom they share many unpleasant characteristics. Both are selfish; withdrawn; manipulative; unstable; reserving all their sweetness for the loved one (or themselves) and turning on their friends like rabid dogs. That was Leon; and yet I treasured him more than ever, now that he finally shared my suffering.

There is a perverse satisfaction in picking at a scab. Lovers do it all the time; seeking out the most intense sources of pain and indulging them, sacrificing themselves again and again for the sake of the loved object with a dogged stupidity that poets have often mistaken for selflessness. With Leon, it was talking about Francesca. With me, it was listening to him. After a while it grew unbearable—love, like cancer, tends to dominate the life of the sufferer so fully that they lose the ability to conduct a conversation on any other subject (so numbingly dull for the listener)—and I found myself trying with increasing desperation to find ways of breaking through the tedium of Leon’s obsession.

“I dare you.” That was me, standing outside the record shop. “Go on, I dare you. That is, if you’ve still got the balls.”

He looked at me, surprised, then looked beyond me into the shop. Something crossed his face—a shadow, perhaps, of pleasures past. Then he grinned, and I now thought I saw a faint reflection of the old, careless, loveless Leon in his gray eyes.

“You talking to
me
?” he said.

And so we
played—the one game this new Leon still accepted to play. And with the game, the Treatment began; unpleasant, even brutish, perhaps, but necessary, just as aggressive chemotherapy can be used to attack cancers. And there was plenty of aggression in both of us; it was simply a question of turning it outward rather than in.

We began with theft. Small things first: records; books; clothes that we dumped in our little hideout in the woods behind St. Oswald’s. The Treatment turned to stronger fare. We graffitied walls and smashed bus shelters. We threw stones at passing cars; pushed over gravestones in the old churchyard; shouted obscenities at elderly dog-walkers who entered our domain. During that fortnight I veered between utter wretchedness and overwhelming joy; we were together again, Butch and Sundance—and for minutes at a time Francesca was forgotten; the thrill of her eclipsed by a stronger, more dangerous rush.

But it never lasted. My treatment was good for the symptoms, not the cause, and I discovered to my chagrin that my patient needed increasingly stronger doses of excitement if he was to respond at all. More and more often it fell to me to think of new things to do, and I found myself struggling to imagine newer and more outrageous exploits for the two of us to perform.

“Record shop?”

“Nah.”

“Graveyard?”

“Banal.”

“Bandstand?”

“Done it.” It was true; the night before, we had broken into the municipal park and smashed every seat on the town bandstand as well as the little railings that surrounded it. I’d felt bad doing it; remembered going into the park with my mother when I was very small; the summer smells of cut grass and hot dogs and candyfloss; the sound of the colliery band. I remembered Sharon Snyde sitting in one of those blue plastic chairs, smoking a cigarette, while I marched up and down going
pom-pom-pom
on an invisible drum, and for a second I felt horribly lost. That was me aged six; that was when I still had a mother who smelled of cigarettes and Cinnabar, and there was nothing braver and more splendid than a town bandstand in summer, and only bad people smashed things up.

“What’s up, Pinchbeck?” It was already late; in the moonlight Leon’s face was slick and dark and knowing. “Had enough already?”

I had. More than enough. But I couldn’t tell Leon; it was my Treatment, after all.

“Come on,” he’d urged. “Think of it as a lesson in taste.”

I had, and my retaliation had been swift. Leon had ordered me to demolish the bandstand; I reciprocated by daring him to tie tin cans to the exhausts of all the cars parked outside the police station. Our stakes escalated; our outrages grew increasingly complicated, even surreal (a row of dead pigeons tied to the railings of the public park; a series of colorful murals on the side of the Methodist church); we defaced walls, broke windows, and frightened small children from one end of town to the other. Only one place remained.

“St. Oswald’s.”

“No way.” So far we had avoided the school grounds—barring a little artistic self-expression on the walls of the Games Pavilion. My thirteenth birthday was days away, and with it approached my mysterious and long-anticipated surprise. My father played it cool, but I could tell he was making an effort. He was dry; he had started exercising; the house was immaculate and his face had developed a hard, dry grin that reflected nothing of what was going on inside. He looked like Clint Eastwood in
High Plains Drifter
; a fat Clint, in any case, but with that same slitty-eyed air of concentration on some eventual, apocalyptic showdown. I approved—it showed resolution—and I didn’t want to blow it all now over some idiotic stunt.

“Come on, Pinchbeck.
Fac ut vivas.
Live a little.”

“What’s the point?” It wouldn’t do to seem too reluctant; Leon would think I was afraid to take the dare. “We’ve done St. Oswald’s a million times.”

“Not this.” His eyes were shining. “I dare you—I dare you to climb to the top of the Chapel roof.” Then he smiled at me, and at that point I saw the man he might have been; his subversive charm; his irrepressible humor. It struck me like a fist, my love for him; the single pure emotion of all my complicated, grubby adolescence. It occurred to me then that if he had asked me to
jump
from the Chapel roof, I would probably have said yes.

“The
roof
?”

He nodded.

I was almost laughing. “All right, I will,” I said. “I’ll bring you back a souvenir.”

“No need,” he said. “I’ll get it myself. What?” Seeing my surprise. “You don’t think I’d let you go up there on your own, do you?”