Kindergarten (8 page)

Yours sincerely,
Dr. Ernst Jacoby and
Dr. Madeleine Jacoby

H
E
O
PENED
Grimm’s Fairy Tales
again at “Hansel and Gretel,” and then turned the pages back to “The Wolf and the Seven Little Kids,” thinking of earlier that evening, when he was sitting on the step beside Jo, listening to Lilli reading. He had a reproduction of a Bewick woodcut as a book-plate in the book. Four little boys sat astride engraved and listing gravestones, riding them as though they were horses. They were dressed as soldiers.

He had just started rereading the story when he heard Jo moving about in his room next door. As he listened, he heard the school clock strike a single note, half past eleven, its deep note followed by the higher single chime of the restaurant clock. The music did not play on the half-hour. Jo and he were the only people in Tennyson’s: Matthias was sleeping in Lilli’s house.

There was a louder bang from the next room, a sound like the bed being shifted.

He wondered if Jo had had another nightmare, and then if he were suffering from asthma again. He had looked a little hunched-up earlier in the evening—the whole upper part of his body shrivelled in on itself—and had gone to bed early, about half an hour after they had arrived back from the churchyard.

He pulled his dressing-gown on and walked through into Jo’s room.

The bedside light was on, and Jo was standing beside his bed, pulling at the bedclothes.

“Hello, little Cornelius.”

“Hello, minuscule Johann.”

“You got me all excited then. I thought Santa was coming back for a second visit.”

“Have you done it again?”

Jo pulled a wry face, and nodded, indicating the wet sheets he was removing from the bed.

“Santa Claus had better wear wellies if he does call again.” He began to sing, “I’m dreaming of a damp Christmas.” At irregular intervals, he had started to wet his bed, and there was a settled routine to be gone through when it happened.

“You get rid of the sheets, Jo. I’ll remake the bed for you.”

“Perhaps I should have been trained with one of those musical potties. The ones that play a tune when you’ve produced something.”

“I always thought they were a rather sinister idea.”

“Brave New Po.”

“And I should think a lot would depend on the tune they chose.”

“What if they chose the national anthem?”

“It could have disastrous consequences in later life. Just imagine, every time you heard that tune you’d…”

“…burst with patriotic fervour.”

“It could ruin a promising career in the diplomatic corps.”

“It could ruin several dozen pairs of socks.”

“And the dangers of a short circuit…”

“It doesn’t bear thinking about.”

The replies came rapidly, automatically. Jo could go on to automatic pilot, and carry on a conversation for a long time, with his mind completely absorbed elsewhere.

He had already washed himself and put on a dry pair of underpants. He slept in a T-shirt and underpants, the pants being easier to clean if he wet himself. He had a wide range of T-shirts with illustrations and slogans. The one he was wearing at the moment had “This Space to Let” printed on its front. He stood across the bed from Corrie as they bundled together the sheets and the waterproof cover. He always held himself very upright, like a small child being reprimanded, just as Corrie did.

“I thought you were putting up some Christmas decorations in here.”

“I decided it was not in the nature of boys to do that kind of thing.”

Jo walked out and went towards the bathroom as Corrie took the spare sheets from the shelf in the cupboard, left ready by Lilli. There was the sound of a tap being turned on.

Jo came back in as Corrie was smoothing out the bottom sheet on the mattress, and stood looking at him for a moment. Corrie smoothed and smoothed the bottom sheet until it was absolutely free of wrinkles. Jo replaced the pillow on the bed, and took the other side of the top sheet.

“Can you think of any uses for a blanket?” Corrie asked as they began to tuck one into the sides of the bed.

Mr. Passenger had asked Jo’s class once to spend an English lesson in writing down as many different uses as they could think of for a barrel, a paper-clip, a brick, and a blanket. Jo had thought of 117 uses before time had run out. Corrie had seen his list later.
A barrel can be used to float over the Niagara Falls. You have to be inside it, though. N.B.
(1)
You can get famous this way. N.B.
(2)
You can also get killed. A barrel can be used for making go-karts and things like that. Boy scouts do this. Greggers is a boy scout, but I don’t think he makes go-karts out of things. You had better ask him. Better still, I’ll ask him, and the next time I do a piece of work for you I’ll put at the top whether he does or not. You can laugh at a barrel. You can have a discussion group, and talk about barrels. You can ignore a barrel. You can roll your trousers up and climb inside a barrel, then roll down a hill, shouting “Cheese!” or something like that
. (
It needn’t be “Cheese.” You can shout whatever you feel like shouting.
) The suggestion that Corrie had liked best was that a brick could be a Bible for an atheist.

Working together, in silence, they finished making the bed.

“Look at this,” Jo said, turning round and pulling down the waistband of his underpants as he climbed back into bed. “Age 7” was printed on the label in broad black lettering beneath the manufacturer’s name. “Humiliating, isn’t it?”

“It’s no fun being a dwarf.”

“I found a poem about you the other day. ‘A Considerable Speck,’ it was called.”

“Oh yes. Robert Frost and I often went swinging on birches together, until he fell off and killed his parrot.”

There was a long silence.

Jo sat up in bed arranging the sheets about him, like a child ill in bed in the middle of the day.

Corrie sat in the cane rocking-chair, pushing himself backwards and forwards. Jo’s clothes were neatly folded on the trunk at the bottom of his bed. The front of the thin sand-coloured jacket he had changed into when they got back from the churchyard was covered in metal badges: “I Am 2.” “Head Girl.” “Netball Captain.” The badge with Shakespeare’s head and “Will Power” on it was from when they had gone to see the Royal Shakespeare Company in London, during a short holiday the previous year.

The painting Lilli had given to Jo, one of her illustrations for “The Six Swans,” hung above his bed. The wall around the painting was covered by large blown-up black-and-white photographs of family and friends which Jo had taken and developed. His own face, and the faces of Dad, Mum, Matthias, Lilli, Sal, his cousins Michael and Lincoln, Judith, Cato, and many others regarded Corrie from across the bed. He thought of Lilli’s dining-room, and the intense close-up examination of the faces of the many people in all the paintings. The baby’s face in the painting Lilli had given Jo was at the very front of the picture as it lay in its cradle beside its sleeping mother, and the evil Queen, her face hidden by a looped curtain at the other side of the room, was walking towards the baby, her hands just beginning to lift up from her side. There was a full-length photograph Jo had taken of him directly opposite. He was wearing the high-heeled boots he wore to make him look taller, and jeans, and his hands were thrust into the slanting pockets of the hooded zip-front sweat-shirt he was wearing. He was pulling a funny face.

He walked across the room.

“I pray you sit by us, and tell’s a tale,” he said, sitting on the bed beside Jo.

“Merry or sad shall’t be?”

“As merry as you will.”

“A sad tale’s best for winter.”

He looked at Jo’s T-shirt.

There was a fashionable shop in London selling T-shirts with the symbol of the Red Phoenix terrorists—the flame and the fist—on them. In the music magazine that Cato bought, next to an advertisement for teenage spots, Corrie had seen a special offer placed by a mail-order company for T-shirts with a line of bullet-holes printed across the front, to make it look as if the wearer had been machine-gunned. The shirts could also be ordered with bullet-holes printed on the back as well as the front, to look as if the bullets had gone right through the wearer’s body. This cost fifty pence extra.

Jo looked ill, strained. There were dark lines under his eyes.

“O.K.?” Corrie asked.

Jo nodded.

“I thought your asthma had started when I heard you moving about.”

He told Jo about Matthias standing like Rupert the Bear, and they sat in silence for a while.

“Any more news about that school?”

Corrie shook his head. “No. They just said again that they wanted the other terrorists released from prison before they’ll set anyone free.”

“And the government won’t let anyone be released?”

Corrie nodded.

“Just the same.”

“Just the same.”

“They can’t do as the terrorists want, can they?” Jo asked. “Release the prisoners? Because if they do, it’ll happen again.”

“It will anyway.”

“How do you stop it happening in the first place?”

“You can’t, can you?”

“The German government isn’t going to negotiate, whatever happens.”

“Do you think they’ll storm the building?”

“It’s the only thing they can do.”

“The terrorists say they’ve got the children spaced out in different rooms. Imagine it in school here. Even if they got to one group in time, the other terrorists would have time to kill the children with them. They’ve got four whole classes. Nearly a half of the school. Could the army attack all the different rooms simultaneously?”

“Something’s going to happen before long. Everyone seems to be co-operating. The Russians and East Germans haven’t made any objections about all the troops being there. They’ve offered to help.”

“They’ve already killed five people. They’ve just been holding on to all those children for all this time.”

Jo flicked at the mobile hanging above his bed, a quick, angry action. “They found somewhere to fly to when they’d killed Mum.”

Something cold brushed against Corrie’s lips. It was one of the figures from the mobile. The eight silvery-metallic sea-gulls swooped and soared in the slightest current of air. He moved back, rubbing at his mouth.

Their newspaper,
The Guardian
, had said “17 K
ILLED
IN
A
IRPORT
A
TTACK
.” A more popular tabloid had had the headline “G
OOD
F
RIDAY
M
ASSACRE
,” adding “O
NE
B
RITON
B
ELIEVED
D
EAD
.” That had been Mum. She had been returning from a conference in Rome, a discussion of recent research into cancer. There was still hope of a breakthrough in finding a cure. She had gone even though she was pregnant.

He had stared at the photographs in
The Guardian
: a man swabbing at a floor with a mop, two men carrying something in a blanket between them. When he was watching the news report of the shooting at the school that afternoon, he had leaned forward to see the body of the woman in more detail. He had wanted to see her face.

The usual clutter of extraordinarily assorted books lay on the carpet beside Jo’s bed, around Corrie’s feet: The Little Prince, Kobbé’s Complete Opera Book, an American photographic magazine, The Mouse and His Child, a paperback edition of Small Is Beautiful (“There’s a book here about us,” he had said to Corrie when he bought it), an old school edition of Emil and the Detectives. His changes of subject-matter from day to day were unpredictable.

His school rough-work book was lying clipped to his drawing-board. It was covered with his tiny neat printing: Open only in case of earthquakes, tornadoes (gale force, assorted debris zooming about), custard pouring from volcanoes, Martians turning into cheese (Camembert), giant bats chewing gum in discothèques, the bus population going green (with ivy, not envy), celebration of annual haircut of Cato Levi, Saturnalia getting divorced from Copernicus, undulations in oscillating rhythm on British Rail track (1st class only)…A length of wood, club-shaped, lay alongside the drawing-board, next to his flute, with the same printing on it in black felt-tip pen at the thinner end. YOB BASHER. HOLD THIS END. Groin: 10 points. Legs: 3 points. Head: 25 points. Arse: 4 points. At one end of it a black circle was labelled Self-destruction button.

Corrie looked at it, then picked it up, waving it at Jo, and spoke in his most refined and sophisticated voice.

“I say, how frightfully childish!”

“Well, we are children,” Jo said, quoting from Emil and the Detectives. He reached over the other side of the bed, away from Corrie, and pulled up his Winnie-the-Pooh, clutching it to him and sucking his thumb noisily. In one sudden movement, he slid beneath the bedclothes, until only his eyes were visible above the sheets.

The ceiling had been entirely covered with Charlie Brown strip cartoons, clipped from a Sunday newspaper colour magazine, bright primary colours of red, blue, and yellow. Corrie thought of the reproduction of Breughel’s “Children’s Games” hanging in the school sanatorium. He had seen it when he had gone to visit Cato, after his appendicitis operation. Mechanically, joylessly, like troops drilled in some repetitive movement, the swarming children filling the streets played their games, each compelled to act the part of a child. Not a single child was laughing, or even smiling. With intense seriousness and concentration, they performed all the actions expected of children, over and over again like clockwork figures, a wound-up toy. Unseen, in the distance, was a refuge, a place to which they could escape if only they realised it was there. Beyond the trees, beyond the river, open green fields stretched emptily away towards a wide horizon.

Beside Jo’s bed was the light Corrie had thought of when he had seen the cake at Lilli’s: a pottery model of the gingerbread house, made so that the light would shine through the windows of the house when it was switched on. The front was open, and miniature furniture inside was clearly visible: the table, the chairs, the tiled oven.