The School of Night: A Novel (5 page)

6

It had not seemed possible, so no one had bothered to consider it. Dan didn’t fail. I could not remember him failing at a single thing. Until now. What a moment to choose. Then it started me thinking. For the past six months he had ceased to answer questions in class, but I had put that down to no more than boredom: Daniel was very easily bored. His decision no longer to accompany me on my rides across the moors and to distant graveyards had hurt briefly, but I had put that down to boredom too. Besides, I had something else on my mind by then: I had fallen in love. With Sally, the assistant librarian on the seventh floor. I no longer woke in the mornings and thought of Daniel Pagett; I woke and thought of a young woman in a sky-blue municipal nylon coat. I could still hear the whispering whistle it made as she walked past my reading table in her high-strapped sandals, with her blonde hair falling to her shoulders. I even started to think of what might be contained inside the sky-blue nylon coat, but then excitement ended in hot confusion.

So I wasn’t jealous of Dan’s absences. If he had struck up with a new companion somewhere, I suppose I might have been, but the only new character he had been seen with was Billy Lister, so jealousy was as impossible as curiosity was inevitable. The Lister Family were a fixed feature of our otherwise peaceful northern town, like the Alhambra Theatre or the moors that surrounded us in all directions. I had first heard the name when I’d looked on astonished at a boy of ten, who had been kicked by a pony which he’d approached from behind, and had then leapt back at the creature in a frenzy, swiping at its legs and neck with a rough stick while the pony bowed its head and took its punishment.

‘Who’s that?’ I had asked.

‘A Lister,’ my companion replied, as though nothing more needed to be said, as though he had simply directed my attention to one of the forces of nature. They lived in various parts of town, some of them in council housing from which it was said they could not be evicted, some in ramshackle buildings they had claimed as their own, and always and everywhere in complete squalor. You didn’t go too near the Listers unless you particularly needed a stay in hospital, but I had once made my way quickly down by their terrace alongside the railway line. Assorted debris cluttered each room while ragged children ran about and yelled. At one window I stopped and stared. There in the front room, happily truffling about amidst the scattered newspapers, was a pig.

The accounts of their doings had become one of the locality’s legends. Every so often a rent collector, a hygiene inspector or a truancy officer would venture into their domain, on the foolish assumption that the law might still obtain where the Listers had planted their ensign. They paid no rent, their children rarely went to school and no one, it seemed, could ever persuade them to do anything they weren’t minded to do. The representatives of these various agencies would be sent packing, with curses ringing in their ears, sometimes even with a wound to show for their pains. They were a sort of collective crime, this extended family, but certainly not an organised one. The menfolk travelled in and out of prison with a regularity other people reserved for their annual holidays. Crimes just happened to the Listers, they didn’t need to organise them. They didn’t organise anything.

And there was only one possible reason for Daniel, of all people, to be seen in the company of Billy Lister: Billy was dealing. His name had already appeared in the local papers and he had some time before received a lengthy spell of probation, after working his way through a number of chemists’ shops in a thirty-mile radius about the town. They had been broken into on successive nights. Dough moulded into the crude metal bells of the burglar alarms meant that their buzzing wouldn’t have woken a slug. I remember thinking to myself with surprise as I read about it that the strategy was really quite intelligent. My old man had never tried anything as cunning as that. I also remember thinking that it wouldn’t be too long before Billy Lister was checking out the facilities my father had known so well at Armley, though I believe an overdose a few years later saved the prison service the trouble.

Between the end of the school day and the pubs opening was Billy’s time around the cenotaph. I had been there once, looking about warily. I can still remember someone called Suzy in her hallucinating colour combination, who at the beginning of that year was laughing a most beguiling laugh, but by the end was wired with some constant electricity that twitched every muscle in her face. Here Billy Lister had returned, with renewed credibility, soon after his probation order, to dispense delight from his pocket pharmacopoeia. All different sizes and colours of pills; uppers, downers, and those they said took you off to somewhere else entirely. People even spoke of the stuff which squirted out of needles, but separate and discreet arrangements had to be made for that.

I had complained once of exhaustion during revision and Dan had slipped me three black bombers, saying I wouldn’t feel tired if I took those. I didn’t either. I stayed up all night, my mind accelerating far ahead of its own thoughts into a region of exhilaration and instantaneous comprehension. First taste of the nocturnal life to come. But I discovered the next day what any devoted amphetamine-user soon learns: each speeding of the mind’s process is matched by an equivalent erasure. Usually of memory. So I declined Dan’s kind offer of any further supplies.

*   *   *

What remains of that summer? We had four weeks of uninterrupted sunshine and Dan was suddenly around again, seeming to gaze upon me and my curious family with fresh attention. We drove for many miles, at weekends taking my grandparents too. I can still remember the sounds of Wharfedale frothing in the morning, or the buzzing factories along the Calder; still remember sitting on benches outside moorside pubs, staring at my grandfather’s face through the aquarium murk of his upended beer glass, or listening to mill-races sucking on their wooden slats. I remember discovering with delight that in Wensleydale the young shoots of grass that start to form a green mist over a hayfield, soon after the first crop, are called fog by the locals. Millstone-grit outcrops; canals with skins untouched by anything except their own weeded memories; the welcome vinegary stink of fish and chips wrapped in the
Telegraph and Argus.
One day, weirdly, a wrecker’s yard void of personnel, where we stumbled about amongst shattered heaps of cars mounted perilously on one another’s bodies, as though they had all died in a scream of metallic copulation. Sometimes I still see the shy ghosts of those days, part of a snow of images in an antiquated cinema, along with rusting advertising signs on old shop walls: Bovril, Oxo, Lifebuoy, Senior Service.

I had prepared myself for Oxford as best I could, spending a little money on clothes. I even did something I have a superstitious dread of: I peered in the mirror. Only the once, and I have largely managed to avoid it ever since. A gangling, mottle-faced youth peered back. I didn’t want to look at him; I’ve never gone bathing in those silver pools. Maybe my repugnance came from that evening when I had seen my mother floating just beneath the water in her bath, for I was the one who’d discovered her. No, if Narcissus had had the same allergy to his reflection that I had to mine, he’d never have drowned.

Dan insisted he would drive me down. He was staying on for a third year in the sixth form to resit his examinations. He could have gone to another university with his grades, but decided to stick to the original plan.

‘You can suss it out for me,’ he said. ‘Get my bed warm.’ He turned up in his Anglia. I put my suitcase in the back, said goodbye to my grandparents and we were off.

As we headed south and the counties began to blur one into another, he suddenly started talking about his mother and the evening I had gone to dinner.

‘You kept looking at her,’ he said.

‘What was I supposed to do?’

‘She could pass for thirty, couldn’t she?’ He paused then. ‘Did you want to?’

‘What?’

‘You know what. Did you, with my mother? Assuming you hadn’t known who she was, would you have?’

‘Maybe,’ I said truthfully, I who had never done ‘it’ with anyone. I thought of Sally.

‘I wouldn’t want to,’ he said, with a vehemence I wasn’t expecting. ‘I might have come out of those soft doors, but believe me I’ve never wanted to get back in. Freud was completely up the spout about that one.’ Then we drove on in silence as we left the north further and further behind us. Finally he spoke again.

‘It’s called Indigo,’ he said, more to himself than me.

‘What is?’

‘My mother’s lipstick. That dead dahlia stuff she smears on all the time. Everyone always wants to know and don’t say you weren’t looking, either. Seems to be something about her mouth does things to men. I just wish she’d seal it up with cement. She gets it from Paris, her Indigo, not that she goes there herself these days. Not at any price. You can probably guess why.’

‘Black men?’

‘Well, anything that’s off-white really.’

‘Unless it’s pink presumably,’ I said and Dan finally unclenched for a moment. There were dark bruises under his eyes that furrowed as he laughed.

‘You’ve been unfaithful, Sean.’

‘How come?’

‘You’ve been seen in the company of that librarian on the seventh floor.’

‘Sally,’ I said and smiled at the taste of the word in my mouth.

‘I’ll keep an eye on her for you while you’re gone.’

7

Hariot’s Notebooks recount a number of incidents concerning Walter Ralegh at Oxford: the magnificent rebukes, the flashing displays of wit, the coruscating diatribes against anyone who tried his patience, which was not very hard to do. Already he was gaining the reputation for arrogance that would cost him dear later in life. Alas, it was not so with me. An alien seed planted amongst the wheatstone pinnacles and towers, that’s how I felt, but I suppose I was far from being alone in that.

‘How are you finding the food down here?’ the Master’s wife tipsily asked me, at the first wine-and-cheese party I attended. She was evidently intrigued by my accent, in pursuit, I daresay, of the latest collegiate exotica. I thought I should give her something to think about.

‘It’s the first time I can remember eating a vegetable.’ She looked at me solicitously. ‘It’s been difficult, you see, the last few years up north,’ I said, with the flattest intonations I could summon.

‘Really. Why’s that?’

‘They’ve been putting up traffic lights finally, but the horses that pull the carts have never been trained to distinguish between the red lights and the green, so the roads have been jammed solid. The food supplies just haven’t been getting through.’

‘I didn’t realise,’ she said, a look of bewilderment briefly crossing her delicate but sozzled features. ‘Now, isn’t your town the one with very high immigration?’

‘No, it’s an optical illusion. One of the industrial side effects of the coal we keep in the bath.’

The bursar, who had been standing behind me in silence, now gave my sleeve a tug. I turned to look at him. A solid, four-square sort of man. Ex-army. Everything about him was polished. He was smiling, but it was a warning smile, as though to say, However squiffy she may be, however rudimentary her demography, the Master’s wife is permanently off-limits. So watch it, sonny.

One evening in the college bar I was sipping my pint when Charles Leggatt came in with a woman. Charlie was a prominent college radical, the most exquisite revolutionary I have ever met, his radical impulse seeming to arise primarily from his profound distaste for anything which might, however remotely, be described as petit-bourgeois. Sadly, he seemed to find the general tenor of revolutionary politics at least as absurd as he usually found the oppressive manoeuvres of capitalism. His interventions in the Junior Common Room debates never took long before they swerved off into sharp-tongued irony. He was valued on both sides for his withering sarcasm, but it was hard to believe that he represented too much of a threat to the system. He was very tall and even thinner than I was. He wore round wire-rimmed glasses and a goatee beard, which made him look like a miscegenation of Trotsky and S.J. Perelman. His eyebrows always arched above the top rim of his glasses, two tiny thatches to roof his pitched, sardonic smile. Now he introduced me to his companion, Becky Southgate. I stared at her spiky corn-coloured hair, her bright liquid eyes; she had the quivering demeanour of a hungry young bird throttling for food.

Charlie seemed to like me, probably because I exhibited not even the most petty of petit-bourgeois traits. Soon we were all talking, then we were arguing. And before I knew where I was, Becky was upbraiding me for my paternalistic view that it wasn’t necessarily a liberation for a woman with children to have to go to work. I kept seeing my grandmother’s buckled legs, after forty years of charring at five o’clock in the morning.

‘I suppose you think we should all be locked in the home, carrying out the domestic chores God appointed for us in the Old Testament.’

There was something in the tone of Becky’s rebuke, in the confidence of its delivery and its long-vowelled intonation, which produced in me a silent fury. I was still trembling with rage by the time she left. Charlie came back alone to the bar.

‘You shouldn’t let Becky Southgate upset you, you know,’ he said in his curiously high-pitched and fluted voice. ‘The main thing to remember about her is that she’s a hysteric and a liar. Do you know that a few months back she actually accused me of deliberately putting my hand on her breast after one of our party meetings? I mean, if I’d needed a tit to maul, there were plenty of others I could have picked on apart from hers, however heroic its dimensions. Sometimes I actually have them
placed
, in my hands, while I’m trying to concentrate on something else entirely. All I was doing, as a matter of fact, was to help her on with her coat – all part of my residual bourgeois inheritance, according to her – but she insisted it was molestation. Harassment. Sexual exploitation. The works. I was brought up before the Disciplinary Committee, Comrade Protheroe to you, the bloke at the top of the new block, reading PPE. He was
very
disapproving.’ He gestured to the barman to refill his gin and tonic. ‘Hysterics, in my experience, always make good liars. My mother’s one, so I should know. They can summon tears from the air. They grow so used to donning the mask of emotional turbulence that, after a while, they can no longer say whether the expression on their face is feigned or not. Have another drink, Sean.’ I nodded. Once again, I was impressed by the way he could reorder without speaking. A hand was waved, a finger pointed. There was an air of command about it all. He continued: ‘A certain restraint of the mind is required to establish the truth, you know; a certain withdrawal from the clamour of emotion. Since the hysterical state abolishes any such restraint, and replaces the veridical with the theatrical, it’s soon emptied of all truths but the purely gestic. Sadly though, it’s far removed from the welcome silence of the dumb show. There’s panic and unease even in their breathing, believe me. When dear Becky is speechless, which isn’t often, admittedly, you can still hear the sharp words growing even sharper an inch or so beneath her tongue. Always ticking on towards the next explosion.’ He sank his drink and once more motioned for his glass to be filled. ‘Nice tits though, it has to be said, simultaneously ample
and
firm.’