Maxwell's Retirement (17 page)

‘Oh.’ Maxwell stuffed the notebook down the
front of his knapsack and dashed down the bus, giving the heads he had missed on the way onto the bus a series of little buffets as he went.

‘What a nutter,’ one woman said to the world in general as the bus gathered speed.

‘You’re right there,’ answered another. ‘He was my teacher up at the school. Mad Max we called him. I knew he’d end up like this, part of some barmy army.’

‘You weren’t wrong,’ said the driver. ‘He was lucky I let him on.’

Maxwell was standing at the bus stop, waving gaily. ‘See,’ said the first woman. ‘Nutter.’

Maxwell toiled up the drive to the reception hut of Paintball Ltd. He was exhausted already. Perhaps this was some sort of test, this cruel gradient, to sort out the old men from the boys. There were a few cars in the car park, unsurprisingly those of Legs, Ryan and Pansy Donaldson. Sylvia Matthews was sitting in a faded canvas chair on the edge of the clearing and burst into hysterics at the sight of his camouflage gear.

‘Max,’ she said, getting up and walking towards him. ‘I knew I could rely on you to make this day faintly bearable.’ She turned his face this way and that with a finger under his chin. ‘You look positively gorgeous. Does your wife know you’re out?’

‘Why thank you, ma’am.’ Maxwell sketched a
curtsey, straight out of
Gone With the Wind
. ‘Yes, she does, thank you very much. I have to ask you though, Sylv, what on earth are we doing here?’

‘Team building,’ she said, looking him straight in the eye, daring him to laugh.

‘Team building? What team? Legs has demolished almost every team in the school that was working well.’

‘Ah,’ again her face scored ten out of ten on Maxwell’s Buster Keaton sliding scale, ‘that’s why we have to build some more.’

‘Didn’t he get rid of people to save money?’

‘Correct.’ She smiled, but it was the smile of a crocodile. ‘But since taking on,’ she glanced behind her and seeing nothing continued, ‘Mrs Donaldson that saving went west; I suppose he doesn’t care any more. Anyway,’ she made an expansive throwing-away gesture, ‘new financial year, what the hey.’

‘Sylvia,’ Maxwell admonished. ‘You’re being very cynical.’

‘Who, me?’ she asked. Then, ‘Sshh, we’re no longer alone.’

Maxwell turned and saw the Big Three approaching from the reception hut. In fact, he mused, Pansy Donaldson was the Big Three on her own. The other two were just for decoration. Diamond opened his mouth to say something but he was beaten to it.

‘Mr Maxwell!’ the woman boomed, as though
they were three miles away, not three yards. ‘I looked everywhere for you yesterday afternoon. Where were you?’

‘Pansy, dear thing,’ the Great Man gushed. ‘I had no idea. Where did you look?’

‘All over your floor. I asked your class, the one you should have been teaching …’ she paused for effect but no one spoke, ‘and they said you had gone out.’

‘Little tinkers,’ Maxwell chuckled. ‘That’s Year Twelve for you. They meant I had gone out to get some books from the library, I expect. The Corn Laws – tchah! You have no idea how many corroborative texts you need to teach those well. If I left them to their own devices, the little dears would merely Google everything and copy it all down from the aptly named Nickipedia.’ He smiled and was amazed to see the corner of Legs Diamond’s mouth twitch in sympathy.

‘Well, I won’t call you a liar, Mr Maxwell,’ she said.

‘That’s good,’ he said, voice dripping ice. ‘Otherwise, you may find yourself hearing from my solicitor.’ Not that Maxwell had one, of course, but Pansy didn’t know that.

‘Steady on, Max,’ Sylvia said, out of the corner of her mouth.

Pansy Donaldson was rocked but not beaten. ‘As I say, I will not call you a liar, but I
will
be watching you, mark my words.’

‘Ah,’ Diamond cried, desperate to change the subject. ‘Here come the others.’

A whole flotilla of cars was making its way up the rutted drive, packed to the doors as the staff of Leighford High School took car-pooling to new heights. Pansy Donaldson metaphorically rubbed her hands together. She looked forward to refusing a good eighty percent of the mileage claims on Monday morning.

A motley crew soon stood in front of the reception hut. Some had followed Maxwell’s thinking and were wearing fatigues or at least really,
really
old leisure clothes, including one rather distressing turquoise tracksuit being worn by Paul Moss, Maxwell’s Head of History. Paul had been a young man when he started at Leighford, but the gruelling demands of AFL had turned him into a wizened prune. The Head of Sixth Form sidled over to him, an interrogative eyebrow raised high.

‘I know, I know,’ Moss said. ‘It was a moment of madness. I will say no more.’

‘I should think not,’ Maxwell agreed, then bounced up and down excitedly. ‘Can I be on your team, can I, can I?’

‘I understand that Pansy has allocated teams already,’ Paul said despondently.

‘Oh, well then,’ Maxwell said. ‘Goodness knows where she will have put me. Digging latrines has got my name all over it.’

Bernard Ryan was clapping his hands together for quiet. It appeared that he had been doing it for some minutes, but no one was taking any notice.

‘Hush!’ Maxwell shouted and made almost everyone jump. ‘Sorry, chaps,’ he said to the staff. ‘But poor old Bernard here has been trying his best to make you shut the hell up.’ He gestured to Ryan. ‘Off you go, then, Bernard.’
Band of Brothers
it was not.

‘Er, thank you, Max. Yes. I have these health and safety sheets which the company has asked us to read. I will be needing your signatures and your names printed at the bottom before we are issued with our paint guns. If you would all like to just get one of these …’ he handed a pile to Pansy Donaldson, ‘yes, that’s right. Pass them round. Has everyone got a pen?’

‘No,’ came a voice from the crowd. ‘We were told to come in old clothes or something we didn’t mind being spoilt and not have anything sharp in the pockets.’

‘Yes, that’s right,’ came from several quarters. The situation had all the potential to turn ugly.

‘Oh, um, yes …’ Bernard Ryan patted his pockets helplessly.

‘Why don’t we form an orderly queue up to the reception desk,’ suggested Maxwell, ‘like pay day in the real army, and while we wait to get to the front, read this paper, and then we can sign it when we get there? Then, they can give us the
guns and we can come out here and form into teams?’

‘Great idea,’ said Paul Moss staunchly, noting that Maxwell had just given everybody Alistair Sim’s Miss Fitton, straight out of
St Trinian’s
. And it had worked.

Reverting to infant school, everyone dutifully queued up and, with only a few sets of lips moving, mostly among the CDT and PE staff, proceeded to read the health and safety instructions. Maxwell was, as if by right, at the front of the queue. It was generally accepted that he wouldn’t be reading the instructions anyway, so he might just as well be first.

He signed the paper with a flourish and handed it to the rather etiolated youth behind the counter.

‘What colour team are you in, Mr Maxwell?’ asked the lad.

Maxwell peered closer. An old Leighford Highena, as he lived and breathed. ‘Quentin? Quentin Marjoribanks, is that you? I always had you down as … I don’t know, a merchant banker or something.’

‘It’s the name, Mr Maxwell. It was your little joke. I got three GCSEs A to C and was lucky to get them, you put on my final report.’

‘Ah, yes.’ Maxwell remembered now. ‘That’s probably why I had you down as a merchant banker, lad. Anyway, I’m afraid I don’t know what colour team I am in.’ He turned to the queue.
‘Could someone ask Mrs Donaldson whose team I am in, please? Thanks.’ While he waited for the answer he smiled at Quentin and drummed his fingers on the counter. The answer came back along the queue like Chinese Whispers.

Paul Moss was right behind him and so it fell to him to give the news. ‘Pansy says she has you down as a joker, Max. Whoever wants you can have you.’

Maxwell chose to take it as a compliment, and if Pansy Donaldson had meant it to be otherwise, she had made a mistake, because arms were in the air all along the queue. Maxwell decided to be merciful. ‘I’ll be on your team, Paul,’ he said, patting him on the back.

Paul Moss leant round and told the lad behind the counter, ‘That will be green, then, Quentin.’

He reached behind him and took down the gun, which was marked with a green circle on the butt. ‘Be careful how you point it, Mr Maxwell. Don’t aim at the head. Don’t shoot at less than a ten-foot range. Always wear your own goggles. The rules are that if you are hit you are out. When you have hit someone stop shooting …’

‘Quentin, lad. Surely, these rules are all on the piece of paper I’ve just signed?’

‘Yes, Mr Maxwell, but …’ He wanted to say that Maxwell clearly had not read the sheet, but somehow the words wouldn’t come. ‘Sorry, Mr Maxwell. Next? Hello, Mr Moss.’

‘Quentin. How’s things?’

‘Mustn’t grumble, Mr Moss. Green, was it?’ And so it went on for the poor hapless lad, until all the staff of Leighford High School were tooled up and ready to go.

Paul Moss clung to Maxwell as his name suggested. The old bugger may be slow on the turns but he was a military historian and tactics were second nature to him. He also led a charmed life, as became obvious as the Head of Sixth Form downed his first victim minutes after Quentin blew his start whistle. Bill Grogan was Head of PE, a first-class lout who had put the mach into macho, but he looked decidedly under par with a splodge of green ooze where his belt buckle might have been.

‘Na na di na na, Bill,’ Maxwell chuckled and rolled into the damp bracken to his left, Moss flinging himself down too.

‘Jesus, Max, I didn’t hear him at all.’

The Generalissimo tapped the side of his nose. ‘Precisely,’ he said. ‘It’s all done by sense of smell. Which team is Pansy in?’ He checked his gun. ‘Head shots may be banned, but in her case I’ll make an exception. Besides, it’ll miss her brain by miles.’

‘No team known to man, Max,’ the Head of History told him. ‘She’s overseeing the whole thing, a sort of umpire. Or do I mean vampire? Die Mavis!’ Moss was on his feet, blasting away at the diminutive teacher of Textiles. He missed by half a wood and Mavis’s missile splattered his
shoulder with yellow goo. He gasped in disbelief. ‘Oh, dear,’ he muttered.

‘Mavis,’ Maxwell trilled in an eerie voice, still lying as he was in the woodland greenery.

‘Who’s that?’ she hissed, frantically looking to left and right and seeing no one but a rather crestfallen Paul Moss, wiping his turquoise top. She fumbled to reload, only to come face to face with Maxwell. She jammed home the cartridge and aimed at him, but the Head of Sixth Form poked his finger down her muzzle.

‘Don’t, Mavis,’ he said softly. ‘Don’t make me kill you.’

‘All right, Max,’ she said and lowered her gun.

There was an awkward moment.

‘What happens now?’ Moss asked.

‘What happens now is that Mavis here retires – oops, there, I’ve said it – and goes down to the gate to tell Pansy how bloody silly all this is. And shut up, Paul. You’re dead.’ He looked down at the man and shook his head, chuckling. ‘Gunned down by Mavis. Oh dear, oh dear.’

He watched them both go, the Head of History and the retiring little seamstress. She was apologising for spoiling his nice blue top and Maxwell could have sworn he heard the ‘r’ word as they reached the bluebells. Now he knew he was on his own. So much for team-building. Maxwell knew these woods well. Apart from being lovely, green and deep, he used to wander
here often, lonely as a cloud, before Nole, before Jacquie, before Metternich and certainly before Paintball Ltd had got their clutches on it. He crawled towards the ditches he knew lay away to his right, his rifle cradled in his arms like everybody did, from
All Quiet on the Western Front
to
The Thin Red Line
. It had to be said, he made Lew Ayres and Sean Penn look like amateurs.

Peering above the tall grass, he had a clear view of the car park, the entrance gates and Sylvia’s First Aid centre. The Florence Nightingale of Leighford High had fixed a rough red cross flag above her car. Bless. One by one, the damned and the dead who were Maxwell’s colleagues drifted back covered in paint to the disapproving clucks of Pansy Donaldson, out of luck, out of the game of life. He could see her clearly and drew a bead on the woman’s head, much as he had once drawn a beard on her photo in the staffroom. But this was no
Enemy at the Gates
. His gun didn’t have Joseph Fiennes’ range. He’d have to get closer.

A curly blonde flashed across his vision. Sally Greenhow, Head of Special Needs, could still turn heads and she turned Maxwell’s now. He hadn’t had time to notice it before, but she was Green by team as well as by name. One of his own. She hit the bracken feet from him, but too far away to risk calling out. Maxwell could see the crouching figures of Mike and Ned, the IT nerds, moving out
of the undergrowth towards her, like the Ghost and the Darkness. ‘Beware the Geeks, Sally, my love,’ he whispered to himself and risked a hand in the air.

Mike spun towards him, but held his fire. Maxwell rolled sideways, scraping his cheek on the rough bark of an oak. He waved at Sally and held up two fingers, pointing in Ned’s direction. Happy, simple soul that she was, Sally just waved back.

Ned’s scarlet shot hit her in the chest as she tried to run backwards and he beamed in triumph as she shouted, ‘Bugger.’ IT, One; Special Needs, Nil.

But Maxwell, of course, was a public schoolboy, bred in the fine tradition of cruel revenge and petty spite. He popped up out of the grass like the Guards at Waterloo and watched as Mike’s scarlet whistled past his arm.

‘Tut, tut, Mike,’ the Head of Sixth Form said, ‘and me a sitting duck.’ He strode forward, fully aware that his gun was empty, and laid a friendly hand on the lad’s shoulder. ‘It seems to me you two boys don’t know the rules.’ And as Ned opened fire on him, Maxwell hauled Mike in front of him and a scarlet stain spread over the geek’s back. Suddenly, there was a scream. It hadn’t come from Mike, dead though he was. Nor from Ned, appalled at having gunned down his oppo. Sally Greenhow was silent. And Maxwell hadn’t screamed like that for years.