The Rise & Fall of Great Powers (19 page)

“Why not try calling a few of the old numbers?”

“First, I didn’t bring that phone book here. Second, I’m on a borrowed cellphone and can’t do endless long-distance. Third, those numbers are ancient, Fogg. This was long before mobiles—back when there still was such a thing as ‘away.’ Speaking of which, I need to get off this line.”

“Is your phone book at the shop?”

“No, it’s in the attic.”

“I could try a few numbers for you.”

“I’m not having you cold-call random people from my past.”

“I wouldn’t mind.”

“Fogg, it’s pointless. The only person in there who’s relevant is someone I’m
not
dealing with. If I trusted her to say anything useful, I’d have tried ages ago.”

“Go on—give us a name.”

“Even if you got her, she’s never saying anything by phone. And I’m not taking a pilgrimage to wherever she is now. She’d make me, for sure. Keep in mind that whatever I spend on travel comes straight out of World’s End—you know that, right? Its funds are mine. If I go broke, that’s it for the shop. This isn’t worth it.”

But that was untrue. The mere prospect of meeting someone from that time had already brought her rushing out here. And this visit with Humphrey—even speaking aloud the name Venn again—had stirred up such disquiet, all the puzzles as upsetting as ever. And Sarah had been there for all of it.

“Let’s find the lady,” Fogg proposed. “Then you can decide what’s to be done.”

“You must be enjoying it alone,” Tooly said. “Doing everything you can to keep me away.”

“Not at all,” he said. “Only, it’s a bit of a mystery story now.”

1988

P
AUL PARTED HER
bedroom curtains, then shook Tooly’s hand to bid her good morning. At 6
A.M.
, she moved like a confused snail, but there was no time to dawdle. The school microbus arrived soon outside Gupta Mansions, trawling the expat warrens of Sukhumvit for students lacking chauffeured cars. Even at this hour, traffic was thick: sooty vans piled with rice sacks, green-and-orange taxis, motorbikes twisting through the gridlock. She rested against the bus window, contemplating the weird city inching past.

The teachers at King Chulalongkorn International School were much like her previous ones. There were the gentle and the spiteful; those who gazed out classroom windows muttering about years till retirement; those who believed themselves capable of transforming each child—of being the one whom every pupil would remember.

Her fourth-grade homeroom teacher was Mr. Priddles, who’d given Tooly and Paul their school tour and then had snapped her up for his class—at least until a spot opened up in fifth grade. She had completed this level of coursework before, he reasoned, which promised high marks, an elevated class average, and better prospects for his second consecutive Teacher of the Year award.

Mr. Priddles—a thirtyish Englishman with trendy denim shirts and gelled ginger hair—was adored by his pupils, which made Tooly’s a lonely and secret loathing. Part of his popularity came from playing a ghetto blaster during class and having the kids transcribe pop lyrics. “It’s about engaging with the written word,” he said. “Two poems written a hundred years apart, yeah? Both are poetry. One is not better.
To say that someone called W. B. Yeats is ‘better’ than someone called Sting is a construct, basically.”

Each day, Tooly arrived praying that a fifth grader had left—that someone’s dad had become president of somewhere, they’d flown home, and she could escape her horrible class. Yet inwardly she doubted her readiness even for fourth grade. Much of each class, she sat awed by the knowledge rattling around in other kids’ heads and absent in hers. To conceal her incompetence, she rarely spoke, which led the other pupils to deem her stuck-up and perhaps smelly.

“Take out a piece of paper, everybody,” Mr. Priddles said. “Time to kick butt, guys!”

The much anticipated writing test was today, producing the first marks of the term—critical to establishing Mr. Priddles’s early lead in the Teacher of the Year race. The subject was “The Old Days,” and the kids could write on any period—the objectives were legible handwriting, orthodox spelling, complete sentences. Tooly could provide none of these, for she had forgotten paper. She whispered to the boy behind her.

“You want to
borrow
some?” he responded. “Or you want to
keep
it? If you
borrow
it, you have to give it back. Or you want to
keep
it?”

“Can I have a piece?”

“
Can
you? Or
may
you?”

Tooly glanced around for someone else to ask.

Mr. Priddles intervened, asking the boy, “
May
she have a piece of paper, Roger?”

“She may,” the little pedant replied, handing it to the teacher.

“Now, then,” Mr. Priddles said, holding the sheet out of Tooly’s reach. “Say, ‘Pretty please.’ ”

“Please.”

“Not to me. To him. Pretty please.”

Softly, she did so.

Mr. Priddles lay down her reward, one sheet of paper. “Now what do you say?”

She hesitated, looked up. “Thank you?”

“Do you mean that?”

“Yes.”

“Very good, then.” He left her to work.

Tooly stared at the blank page. Each time she raised her pencil over it, her fingers trembled. Why was she even here? And why did everyone love Mr. Priddles when he was so obviously horrible? Was she the only one who noticed this? She looked at the others writing, then back at her sheet. Several times, she tried to imagine the old days, yet the present days kept intruding.

“Time’s nearly up!” Mr. Priddles said eventually. “Finish up, cowboys and cowgirls. One minute, then hand them in.”

She had written nothing. Everyone else was getting up. Panicking, Tooly joined the mob crushing toward the front, slipped her blank page among theirs, and escaped into the hall.

The next day, she stood before the principal, insisting that she
had
handed in her work. It must’ve gotten lost. They knew she was lying and told her so. Tooly reiterated her predicament: she wasn’t even supposed to be in this grade. Please.

“Maybe that
is
the problem,” Principal Cutter acknowledged. “Maybe you
have
been in the wrong grade.”

Tooly’s despondency switched to excitement. Someone was listening! He placed a few calls and, minutes later, she had a new homeroom teacher, the affable Miss Fowler. In third grade.

Tooly pinched her stomach, saying nothing as she left the office. She had to do
two years
of her life over now.

After a week in third grade, Tooly was offered the chance to repeat her writing test under the supervision of a parent. If she performed at a superior level, the principal would consider—just consider—fifth grade, where a space had opened up.

Paul set the allotted twenty minutes on his digital watch, found her a pencil and paper, and started the countdown. Although she had an uncanny ability to know the length of one minute, Tooly suffered an equal inability to estimate longer periods: they stretched infinitely, then ended all of a sudden. Paul called time and lifted away her sheet,
though her work was unchecked, uncorrected, incomplete. She hadn’t written one-third of what she’d planned to say about the old days.

“I didn’t get to the end.”

“We can’t cheat.”

“Just to put some small things in? Please?”

“They said only twenty minutes.”

Tooly lay on her bed, listening to the computer in Paul’s bedroom whirring and blipping as he began work for the evening. She crept back into the living room, drew her assignment from his briefcase, and resumed writing, continuing for nearly forty minutes, terrorized by the possibility of his return. One last time, she read over her essay. It was perfect:

Intrduction

People led a very different life from us in the Old Days. They did not travel alot because of the bad conditions. They had no radios telephones or any other means of communication. They had no television so they saw plays or listened to music instead. The punishments were very hard and cruel. Their clothing was very different from ours. The rich ladies wore beatiful colorful dresses and lovely hats. The poor had less clothes.

People were tougher and noisier than we are now they were quick to lagh and sing but also quick to quarrel and fight.

They were fearful of wichcraft, but respectful of others of higher rank.

They were usually married at 14 yrs, or there about, middle aged at 30 yrs, and not many lived to an old age.

They made cheese. Alot of fruit
was grown
was grown especially apples and cherries. The rich and powerful land owners siezed the common land and fenced it in as their own.

People liked to have their houses decrated beautifuly with carvings. They also liked attrative chimneys. Not all houses were made of wood. Infact many of them were made of brick.

The sailors who manned ships in the Old Days lived a hard and often dangerous life. Their ships were small and cramped. The men lived in front of the ship which was damp and like the rest of the ship infested with rats.

A woman who nagged her husband was tied to a ducking-stool and ducked in a pond or river. She could also have a scold’s bridle put on her head. In the bridle was a piece of iron which was fastened across her tounge and kept it still.

THE END.

She counted the paragraphs—eight, the most she’d done in one go. She slipped the test back into Paul’s briefcase. The following morning, he stuffed it into an envelope and signed his name over the sealed flap, sending it with her to school. Tooly handed it in, jittery with excitement.

That evening, Principal Cutter telephoned her home to give the result. She handed the receiver to Paul and ran into her room. After he’d hung up, Tooly rushed back, heart pounding, to learn the grown-ups’ verdict on her life. “Did he say I can go in fifth?”

Paul collected his binoculars. As a special occasion, he said, they were going to look for birdlife at Lumpini Park.

In the early-evening heat, he gazed up at the trees, as she gazed up at him in agony. “Keep your eyes out for bulbuls and bee-eaters,” he said. “You hear that? That was a coppersmith barbet.” He directed Tooly to a leaking hose, at which a blue-winged pitta drank.

Paul pressed the binoculars to her eyes, his unsteady grip making for a dizzying view. “Your principal,” he informed her, “says it’s not believable that you wrote so much in twenty minutes.”

“But you timed me! Did you tell them?”

“I can’t cause a commotion. Can’t draw attention over this. Do you like that bird?” he asked, by way of apology.

“I don’t know.”

“You can stay in third grade.”

“No, please,” she said, looking at him.

“Or you can go up a grade.”

“To fifth?”

“Back to fourth, with your teacher from before, the one everyone says is so good.”

“Mr. Priddles?”

The Thai national anthem burst from the loudspeakers, as it did each evening at 6
P.M.
Everyone fell silent and stood at attention, even the joggers, chests heaving, sweat rolling down their faces. In hired boats on the lake, people stilled the wobbling vessels.

“But I—”

“Shush,” Paul said.

“I wasn’t supposed to be in that grade,” she whispered. “It’s—”

“Shh!”

The school gave her a failing mark for the writing test, which drove down Mr. Priddles’s class average; he might not win Teacher of the Year now. Even more vexing, this girl—whom he’d generously taken into his class—turned out to be a defiant little thing. She never laughed at his witticisms, though others were in hysterics. She was a dud, and he was saddled with her.

Thereafter, whenever she asked a question Mr. Priddles pretended not to hear. When she handed in work, he rejected it on any pretext: “Wrong color pen!” He ridiculed her before the others and—to their delight—once tied Tooly to her desk with a scarf after she stood up without permission to look out the window. If she approached him after class, he spoke sweetly, while looking as if he might spit on her. “Mustn’t moan all the time,” he said. “It’s all subjective anyway.”

“What does ‘subjective’ mean?”

“It’s when the person in charge decides.”

His contempt transmitted to the kids, who treated her as if she were diseased. One day, a boy sneaked up behind her in the hall and choked her for no reason. She stopped trying after that, read novels under her desk, and did her best to lower the class average. Whenever
Mr. Priddles played pop songs, she exerted herself not to hear or to absorb the idiotic words. At lunch, she stole away to read her book, erasing an hour. Had it been possible to cut longer stretches from her life, she would have.

Later that week, during Mr. Priddles’s class about poor people, he played “We Are the World,” the lyrics printed on the blackboard:

It’s true we’ll make a better day

Just you and me
.

The question was whether the final line, grammatically speaking, should read “Just you and
I
.” As Mr. Priddles rewound the cassette, Tooly mumbled a mysterious word—“brimstone”—from the book secretly open under her desk, realizing too late that she’d said it rather loudly.

“Pardon us?” he said.

Everyone looked at her.

She chewed a strand of her hair. “Nothing.”

“Share with the class.”

“Uhm,” Tooly began, “there’s just a thing, ‘brimstone,’ that I don’t know what it is.”

“You mean ‘grindstone,’ ” he corrected her. “It’s what you put your nose to.”

A boy asked, “Why do you put your
nose
to it, Mr. P?”

“It’s a totally cool saying, isn’t it?” he replied. “Basically, it means working hard.”

Tooly consulted the page on her lap—the word was indeed “
brim
stone,” with neither grind nor nose in sight. “Brimstone,” she repeated.