The School of Night: A Novel (2 page)

2

Maggots are clean as cats, but they do sweat. Any place that contained them was soon pervaded by a lingering and slightly suffocating smell, as though the air itself were being subtly eaten away.

They were kept in big green plastic tubs and they squirmed and wriggled over each other like dwarf anaemic worms. When they split open, what came out was acrid milk. We would hand over our cloth bags to the owner of the fishing shop, who scraped up our sixpenny portions in a silver scoop.

In my memory Daniel Pagett and I are still sitting at the side of a canal waiting for the rain to pour out of a blackening sky, our luminous floats upright in the dead, unmoving water. From time to time we reel in, rip the drowned maggot off the hook and carefully attach a new one, the juiciest we can locate. We thread the hook’s point between the tiny beige freckles of those embryo eyes, as the maggot wriggles between thumb and forefinger. There is a creamy spurt as the barb cuts through, then our lines are flicked smartly back over the water. And we wait.

The symmetrical windows of warehouses and mills stare down at us and now and then a narrow boat chugs along between the locks, seeming to take an age before it arrives, its vivid paintwork freakish against black water and black stone. Occasionally there might even be the wet flapping miracle of a fish, a roach perhaps or a perch with its poisonous dorsal. You had to press it down flat like a fan so it couldn’t sting you. But not the pike we always talked about; that was to remain only a gleam of menace in our darker thoughts. Then back home again on the top deck of the bus, with a stale sensation in my mouth of smoke and sour metal, a taste like the word futility on my tongue. Did Dan feel that way too? Was that why he always said, ‘A maggot’s life, Sean, is it really worth it?’ I surface from the memorial contamination of these murky trawls and wish I could ask him. I think I might have left it too late. Before many hours have passed I’ll watch his coffin rolling slowly through the curtains in the crematorium chapel. I could ask his wife, I suppose, but she is in another room below me, sleeping.

Daniel Pagett, whose dying wish was to bequeath me that portion of his life he couldn’t stay around to finish for himself. Shall his gift be a curse or a blessing? Only by following the thread of the days that lie ahead will I ever get to the heart of the matter and find out.

*   *   *

It is December and the weather is dirty. I stare at the notebooks lying open before me. I have already decoded most of their names, the members of the School of Night: Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Hariot himself, the Wizard Earl, Thom Nashe, Lord Strange, George Chapman, Matthew Roydon. Every now and then the names of John Dee and Giordano Bruno appear, brilliant reflections that glitter on a shifting surface. And always and everywhere Walter Ralegh, who lived like a star, a light that blazed even in the eyes of those who hated him. These men entrusted to one another thoughts so startling and illegal that each held the life of the others in his hand and on his tongue. A few words in the wrong ear could mean death for any one of them. Another reason for them to congregate only when the lights had gone down. Creatures of darkness, one and all.

If you could see me out there from the far side of this glass, which nobody can, you wouldn’t notice anything unusual in my appearance. A little over six foot tall, thin, my dirty yellow hair just about neat enough, at least for my occupation. I am obviously not a businessman; I lack any precision of grooming or dress. Even in new clothes, which I very rarely buy, I retain a mildly dishevelled look. But I have acquired a certain appearance of public confidence, however misleading the persona might be. I even have a deep tan, which could make me stand out in these sunless regions. You would certainly not guess from my expressionless face tonight what loathing once filled me at the spectacle of my own body. It was this self-directed disgust, not so uncommon perhaps in adolescent boys, which made me wake every morning and think of Daniel Pagett.

These days when so many memoirs recount the late discovery of an occulted sexuality, it might be as well to make something plain: I never wanted to have Daniel Pagett, indeed I could not properly have imagined what such a possession might mean. I didn’t want to have Dan, I wanted to be him. I would have preferred to inhabit his body and his mind, and would have been only too happy to relinquish my own in return. But instead I would lie on the sheets in the early morning and look down: the ribs protruded clearly underneath my skin and all I could think of as I stared at myself was the turkey at Christmas being gradually picked clean, a hull’s skeleton emerging slowly through the sand.

I was taller by a good two inches, but painfully thin, while Dan’s body seemed somehow more serious, solid all the way to the ground and built for business. As the years passed, this contrast grew more pronounced, with me finally breaching six foot, all bony, stooping hesitancy, and Dan there beneath me taut and trim as a sail. I would stand on the sideline, in reserve, and watch him slick down towards the goal. Any comparison of bodies led swiftly to despair, so I thought I’d better concentrate instead on the matter of mind.

Dan had never communicated with me since that day in the playground, not even by writing another message in the mist of his breath on a windowpane. Once, when asked by Crawley which category of man he found most despicable, he had answered without hesitation, ‘The coward’. I watched from the other side of the class as my contemptuous saviour raised hands and answered questions, passed examinations, received the incessant praise of those in authority. Then, ill at ease in any case out on the streets around my home, I took to the library.

It had risen over the previous year, a great tower of concrete and glass in the city centre, a tribute to the north’s wary respect for learning. Our sons and daughters, it announced in solemn tones, will suffer no impoverishment in matters of the intellect. As for the wariness, that was easily explained, since whenever its sons and daughters started to distinguish themselves in any intellectual field they left town by the next train.

Here, on the seventh floor, I began to read and discovered, contrary to so many experts I’ve encountered subsequently, that intelligence could be acquired and enlarged; that the innate part was no more than the ghost of a chance with which to get started. As I read books in greater and greater quantities, I felt the minds that fashioned them entering me, bringing new words and sensations, opening up unexpected reaches inside which I’d never imagined possible (I even discovered that the vast territory of nameless dread was not one experienced by me alone). My hand went up in class too, and as I was rewarded with encouraging nods and even an occasional smile from Mr Crawley, I began to answer as often as Dan. An unexpected fluency issued from my mouth; the dead had taken to speaking through me. If that sounds grand, I can’t think of a more mundane way of putting it. I certainly hadn’t spoken that way before and I hadn’t learnt it from anyone at home, so how else can I describe what was going on?

In the end-of-year examinations when we were fifteen, Daniel Pagett and I shared first and second place in a number of subjects. This astonished everyone, but no one as much as me. Dan and I still didn’t speak though, and if I closed my eyes I could always see his finger writing the word
CHICKEN
on that school bus window. But then Mr Crawley formed his little group.

There was a question often in my mind in those years and it was this: can you be popular and yet have no friends? This seemed to be the case with Daniel. Everyone thought highly of him (with the possible exception of Mark Scully) but he was close to no one. In the days when only policemen and soldiers had short hair, Dan’s was cropped. Its spiky bristle formed an appropriate thatch above his large brown eyes. His nose was firm and secure, not like mine, which was thin and fragile, almost inviting someone to come along and break it. Daniel didn’t seem to blink much either and his beard, which arrived early, was dark. When mine came years later at university it was fair and furry, hardly worth the trouble of a razor. Dan was one of those boys who seemed ready for the world from the word go; after that he simply grew readier and readier. And yet even when he was smiling, his full-fleshed lips turned down at the edges with a permanent hint of contempt.

Crawley’s subject was history. History with him was an unceasing obsession, and it was Crawley’s group that finally brought Dan and me together. Its purpose was to get people into Oxford, Crawley’s old university. Each Friday night during term he held a seminar at his house, which was half a mile away from the school. One of the boys would read out an essay and the others would be expected to comment upon it intelligently. We had been chosen for signs of maverick intelligence, little rogue sparks flying unexpectedly from the steady flame of the curriculum. Increasingly Crawley came to focus his attention on Daniel and me, and increasingly I found myself speaking, over a whole variety of subjects, words which had leeched into me from my hungry reading. Sometimes I even startled myself with how precise and articulate my working-class tongue was becoming. And each Friday night, as we left Crawley’s little house, Dan and I would be carrying more borrowed books in our arms than all the others put together. Dan had taken to listening carefully whenever I spoke and then at last he started talking too. I can still remember that day as clearly as any in my life. It seemed I had been forgiven at last for my lack of physical courage; that the new-found clarity of my thoughts might make up in some way for the incoherent fog where all my actions disappeared. Or was Dan merely curious to know who and what I was? Whatever the reason, he spoke.

‘Would you like to go fishing tomorrow, Sean?’

*   *   *

The next day we sat for the first time on that towpath, waiting for something under the water’s dark surface to make contact.

3

Four decades of cowardice: can I now be really shaking free of it? Dan had put the matter with characteristic pungency: what some might have called my resignation, my patience in the face of all misfortune and adversity, he called cowardice. By which he meant that I accepted whatever life put in front of me without demur. I never answered reality back. I did not engage in that tough quarrel with the given that the Greeks called dialectics. I had learnt to put it differently: I never tried to push against the river. But the first truly dialectical manoeuvre of my life was undoubtedly the theft I committed the day after Daniel died. At long last it seemed I was reclaiming my identity, following in my absent father’s footsteps.

I can see the navigation lights of a boat out there, a luminous smear like a snail’s progress across the dark and shifting acres. I can’t fathom any clues as to what happens next though, in the sea’s traffic and the wind’s bluster. Who else but Daniel Pagett could pursue me like this from the grave? And he’s not yet in the grave. I think he is here now, in this tower. Those might even be his thoughts entering the woman who sleeps alone downstairs. Dan’s last woman. His last woman and his first. The line I’ve just decoded in the Hariot Notebooks is this:

Sir Walter said today: Is that the sin against time then, to lament it can never run backwards?

When Dan finally came home with me, I felt uneasy about letting him in. I had never been to his house, but I’d heard enough about his very different circumstances. And it was true that, on entering my grandparents’ small and crowded front room, he looked about him initially as an anthropologist might on discovering an unknown tribe, but it hadn’t taken long for him to make himself comfortable. Very comfortable.

‘I think I’ll come to Blackpool with you this year,’ he said one day as we walked through town.

‘But you haven’t been invited.’

‘Get me invited, then, Sean, or what would be the point of keeping you in service?’ In saying this, he placed a little more emphasis than usual upon another quality that distinguished him from those about him: how nicely spoken he was, in a region where the pronunciation of an aitch was thought by most to be a waste of breath.

Two months later we sat in Yates’s Wine Lodge as my grandmother told stories. I’d already heard them all at least twice, but for Dan they were undiscovered country. She was talking of some of my grandfather’s more notorious misfortunes while out drinking.

‘One Saturday night he was so blotto he didn’t realise how thick the fog was until he’d left the pub. He knew his way all right, but the drink must have affected his compass. He made straight for Horton Park Pond. And fell in. Well, the last time anybody saw anything alive in there was before the war, but there’s no shortage of slime. In fact, come to think of it, there’s a lot more slime than there is water these days.’ My grandfather had returned to the table with drinks from the bar. He gave his wife a sceptical look, his green eyes suddenly piercingly precise. Despite his years of boozing, working on the bins had kept him lean.

‘Not that one again,’ he said. She shook her white head at him, though it shook slightly all the time by that stage.

‘You go outside, you, if you don’t want to hear. Anyway, he got himself out of the pond finally, but he brought half the slime with him. He was covered from head to foot, and he’d left his keys in there for good measure. He managed to get back to our house, though God knows how, and started banging on the door. I went down and looked out through the letter box. All I saw was a green man and I thought, he’s not coming in here, whoever he is. He ended up sleeping on the doorstep, though he’d done that before.

‘In the morning I took out a bucket of water and cleaned him down, and there he was, good as new.’

‘Nearly died of bloody pneumonia,’ the old man said, though without apparent rancour.

Each day we walked along piers, pressed coins into slot machines, ate hot dogs, hamburgers, candyfloss and toffee apples, drank beer then fell asleep swiftly on the beach with the gritty tang of hot sand beneath our skin. There were still some mill girls about in those days, even if their skirts no longer billowed out like hybrid roses, as they’d once been framed in Bert Hardy’s famous Brownie. Blackpool is the least liminal of any seaside town – its only lethal edge is the one between the workday and the holiday. Towards the end of the week, Dan and I set off alone to the South Shore. Within an hour, Dan had picked up two girls. I say he had because I had nothing to do with the operation and was convinced that it was Dan they were both after anyway, even the one who linked her arm through mine later as we walked along the promenade. I had been trying to remember how much it would cost for us all to have a ride on top of one of the open-air trams that were clanging past. Not that there was any money left in my pocket, but there still seemed to be plenty in Dan’s.