The Red Road (26 page)

“Really, Dad?” Dave said.

“Back up in Yorkshire. It was
almost the done thing back then. Your grandma was absolutely furious.
Can’t do that these days. David, go and fetch five cans from the
fridge, would you?”

Dave did so eagerly, returning from
the fridge bearing five additional cans of Carling, still affixed to
the plastic holder they had come in. We eagerly cracked them open.

“Actually, David, could you get
some glasses, too?” Jim asked. “It’s better you don’t drink
it straight from the can.” He next showed us how to pour the beer,
tilting the glass at an angle and pouring the contents of the can
slowly into it. We did as shown, some pouring a little faster than
others, and the beer fizzing up too much.

“Oops!” Baz said, putting his
hand over the glass to stop it from bubbling over and dripping onto
the coffee table. “Sorry,” he said.

“Don’t worry, just try not to
get it on the carpet,” Dave’s father waved his hand dismissively,
his focus now mostly on the TV.

The players were starting to exit the
tunnel, the commentator talking about each of them, mentioning past
performances, any injuries that they might have sustained, and the
occasional mention of something that had been happening in their
personal lives. Hooper, Jones, Rush, Barnes were some of the names I
heard and saw on the screen. With my focus on the beer I had been
given, the information mostly washed over me. It probably would have
anyway, to be honest. For someone not into the sport, it was quite a
lot to take in all at once, and I had forgotten most of the names of
the players by the time it came to kick off.

I had never had beer before, my
parents refusing to let me have any. I wondered how it might taste.
Quite sour, I thought, as I lowered the glass after my first gulp.
Dave’s father started to chuckle, and I realised that, as with
everyone else, I had grimaced a little at the taste.

“I didn’t like it to begin with,
either,” he said. “Give it couple more goes and you’ll be
okay.”

I did so, finding it not quite as
bad as before. Maybe my tongue had gotten over the initial shock of
this brand-new taste. I took another gulp. That one was even better.
Still a little bitter, but not nearly as bad as the first taste.

“What do you think?” Baz asked.

“Yeah, it’s okay actually,” I
said. “I’m trying to think what it tastes like,” I added,
looking over what was written on the side of the can and what the
ingredients were. Hops and barley I recognised from discussions in
biology class.

“Beer tastes like beer,” Jim
said with another chuckle. We continued to drink for a while,
watching the TV and silently nodding our appreciation of our first
ever beers to one another. I often thought that it might have
happened in a pub. I conceded that around a friend’s house or even
at my parents’ own was far more realistic.

“Don’t like it?” Jim then
said, looking at Rob.

We all turned to Rob, who looked to
be trying to drink his beer, but was struggling in both his effort to
do so and maintain the mask that he was enjoying it. I could tell
already that he was actually going to choke it down, drinking it only
out of politeness to his hosts.

“It’s okay if you don’t like
it,” Jim said. “Some people don’t. Others only acquire a taste
for it when they get older.”

Rob looked a little sheepish as he
put the can down, admitting defeat. He clearly wanted to drink it to
save face with his peers, but I already knew that he would only get
so far. After all this time of wanting to get into a pub and enjoy a
drink, dragging me all over Baconsdale in the attempt, he had
discovered that it wasn’t really for him.

“There’s cider, if you want to
give that a try?” Dave’s father suggested. “It’s sweeter than
beer, so it might be more your thing. It’s rather like drinking
fizzy apple juice.”

“Sure,” Rob said. “Thank you.”

“David, go fetch a cider from the
fridge. It’s the can of Strongbow,” he clarified as Dave got up
to once more go to the kitchen. “And bring that big bag of crisps
with you, from the top cupboard.”

Dave returned, bearing Rob’s
cider, as well as a big bowl into which he had emptied the packet of
crisps. The cider can was quite a bit larger than our Carlings had
been, and Rob found the cider far more palatable than the beer. I
knew deep down that he was disappointed, despite how much he might be
trying to disguise it.

We all turned our attention to the
game. The match was being played at Anfield, Liverpool’s home
ground. I had never been into football in the main, but admitted that
it was quite exciting. Jim wasn’t too impressed, however, the score
being one-nil to Genoa at half time.

“Is it worth me watching the rest
of this?” he asked, looking at Dave, who only shrugged, clearly not
wanting to give anything away.

“So, do you think they’re going
to close the school down?” Jim asked us as he began to fast-forward
through the half-time commentary and the adverts.

“Close it?” I asked.

“Because of the murders.”

Would they? It was only something I
had briefly considered, and quite fleetingly at that. As much as I no
longer enjoyed my time at St Christopher’s, I had never given
thought to there coming a point when the school might cease to exist
or shut down for any reason. I saw it as outlasting me, continuing to
educate boys and take on new pupils long after I had lived my life.

“I don’t think so,” I said,
glancing at the others. “It would be pretty bad for us if they did,
since we’d all have to find somewhere else to go.” And though
that was my overall goal by the end of the school year, I didn’t
want it to happen just yet.

“Yeah, and we’d have to finish
our courses and sit our exams at different schools,” Rob said.

“True,” Jim said. “And they
would only let you do that if they had room. Otherwise, you’d have
to sit your GCSEs out and do them next year. That would then mean
that you would be a year older than everyone else going into higher
education,” he added, finishing his current glass of beer and
pouring out the can that Rob hadn’t drunk into the glass. I noticed
that the speed of his drinking had slowed after he had initially
swallowed down half of his first glass very quickly.

“Gawd, man, I wouldn’t want to
repeat the third year entirely,” Baz said. “Some of the schools
around where I live are rough as.”

“Yeah, none of the three schools
in Baconsdale are supposed to be very good,” Rob said, with a
glance in my direction.

I had heard the very same. The
thought of having to attend the comprehensives, even for a year,
filled me with chills. I vaguely wondered if perhaps my time at St
Christopher’s had turned me into a snob. Or perhaps it was just the
beer I was drinking. It was making me start to feel a little funny.

“I don’t mean to bring you
down,” Jim started, “but I think you might have to accept that
there is a very real possibility that the school
will
shut.”

“Seriously?” I said, starting to
feel very despondent.

“I think so,” Jim nodded, taking
a drink of beer. “Actually, it all depends on what the school says
themselves and just how pragmatic the headmaster can be in his
response to the incidents. But if he’s unable to provide any real
assurances that the school is safe, then it will close down for
certain. And even if it does stay open, I won’t let you go back
there if I don’t think they’re taking the issue seriously,
David.”

Dave nodded, but said nothing.

“The rest of you should think very
strongly about that, too.” he told us. “But assuming it does stay
open and the whole nasty business is dealt with, are any of you
thinking of leaving once you finish your GCSEs?”

I kept my expression deadpan as I
looked about my friends’ faces, seeing the unspoken refusal to
uproot themselves from the place they had called home just yet.
Baz said nothing, despite his confession to me the
previous month, and avoided direct eye contact.

“I think we’re all staying put,”
I said. “Better the devil you know and all that.”

“What about you, Sam? What are
your plans after you finish your A-Levels? Assuming you stay here
that long?” Jim asked, pressing play on the video remote to resume
the football match. “Thinking of heading back to the States?”

“No way,” Sam said. “I want to
go to university here.”

Jim chuckled. “You seem very sure
of that.”

“I’m thinking of going to
Durham,” Sam said. “I don’t think I’m going to get into
Oxford or Cambridge, so I’m just going to nip it in the bud now.”

“Why don’t you want to go back
home?” I asked. I was pleased that Sam was keen to stay in England,
but wondered what the draw of staying put was. I always thought that
American universities (or colleges, as I believed they were called)
were better.

“You can’t drink until you’re
twenty-one,” Sam reiterated what I had heard at the post-rugby
match tea the previous term.

“Seriously? Twenty-one?” Jim
said, looking a little surprised.

Sam nodded. “That’s why you
always see college guys desperately trying to get hold of kegs in the
movies. It’s illegal if you’re under twenty-one. You can get
expelled if you get caught doing it repeatedly.”

“Well, I never knew that,” Jim
admitted. “I always thought it was the same as here.”

“So?” Baz giggled, somewhat
sloshily. “Don’t get caught.”

“But that’s only to buy beer,
right?” I said, looking both to my friends and the beers we held,
as well as Dave’s father. This wasn’t a bar; we were drinking at
home. My parents had, on occasion, as with many others I knew, given
me a small glass of wine with my Sunday roast. There was nothing
illegal about that, I was sure.

“No,” Sam said. “In some
places it’s illegal to even drink it if you’re under twenty-one.
Imagine going through university and not being allowed to drink.
Those are meant to be the best days of your life. I’m not planning
on doing that sober.”

Jim started to laugh. “Days so
good that you can’t remember any of them. Not the best reason for
staying here that I’ve ever heard.”

“You can, however, get a learner’s
permit to drive a car back home when you’re fifteen,” Sam said.

That reminded me. I would be able to
apply for my provisional license in a little under ten months. I knew
I would be watching that particular date on the calendar very
closely.

“But how old do you have to be to
actually drive?” Rob wanted to know.

“Oh ... actually, I think that’s
still seventeen,” Sam said after a pause. ”So, the same as over
here.”

“No other reasons for staying?”
Jim asked, his focus mostly on the TV.

“Oh, I’ll want to hang around
with these guys, for sure,” Sam said. “Friends for life and all.”

We all smiled and giggled, then
raised our glasses and clinked them off one another. I would most
certainly be keeping in touch with these four, no matter what
happened.

Dave picked up his can to refill his
glass, but found that only a little beer was left. “Can we have
another?” he ventured of his father.

“No, I think you’ve had enough
now,” Jim said after a moment of consideration.

“Not a whole one. What if we get
two and just share them?”

“Well, okay,” Jim said. “But
don’t cry to me if you have a headache in the morning. And if
anyone is sick in the middle of the night, you’re cleaning it up,
okay?”

“Yes, Dad,” Dave said. He
fetched two more beers, Rob passing on drinking any more cider, and
we watched the Liverpool-Genoa match resume. Liverpool lost two-one.

~ ~ ~

We realised as we finished up for
the night that Baz still had to get home. It had apparently slipped
Jim’s mind, too, something he berated himself about for letting us
drink. Baz wasn’t drunk, but seemed to be the wrong side of merry.
He obviously couldn’t handle the beer as well as some of the rest
of us.

Unable to drive him and unwilling to
either let him take a bus or the Tube, Jim called a taxi and had it
take Baz all the way home, giving him the money for the journey in
advance. Despite being somewhat inebriated, Baz was slightly
embarrassed by the gesture and made sure that he repaid Dave in full
the following day. Strangely, Baz didn’t have a hangover. The rest
of us did. We didn’t complain about it, though.

~ ~ ~

The following week, my parents
received a phone call. St Christopher’s was re-opening and the
spring term was to resume as normal.

“Is it safe?” my parents had
wanted to know.

“Yes, it is,” they were told.

The police had apparently made an
arrest.

Chapter Eighteen

I
was seated next to Baz and Sam, crammed into the assembly hall, the
entire school once more in attendance. Or at least, the ones who had
chosen to stay. As my parents had arrived at the school, I had seen a
number of cars being loaded up, duvets, suitcases and all manner of
other items being loaded into the back of them. It hadn’t taken me
long to discover what was going on. A number of the families
returning to St Christopher’s had concluded that the school was no
longer safe, despite the reassurances of the headmaster. They had
therefore decided it was best to remove their sons from the
school and find a new place to educate them. The casualty rate was
said to be about one-third of the entire school population.

“The headmaster is holding a
meeting for the parents,” I had heard Mr Somers saying to one of
the first year’s mother and father. “If you would like to attend,
I think it is a very much worth your while.”

“We don’t think so,” the boy’s
mother had responded. “Thank you. We’ll be in touch regarding
report cards and final billing.”

My mother and father had glanced at
me, their eyes suggesting for once that I didn’t have to stay and
could go back home if I wanted to.