The Standing Water (3 page)

We knew. But it
wasn’t us Davis had seen. My breath surged out with a relief so loud I feared
Weirton would hear. The vast eyes flicked towards me, but then they went on
panning over our rows. Weirton yelled some more about the deadly folly of
provoking Marcus.

‘It would be easy
enough for that pond to be the death of any one of you! One little slip or
stumble and you could be under those dark waters! Believe me, I know! One slip
and you could be drowning in that filthy pool!’

Weirton had to be
talking about how Marcus had met his end! What more did he know about it?

‘So, for heaven’s
sake!’ the headmaster shouted. ‘Stay away from there!’

Weirton tugged out
his hankie again, mopped his face. His breath was somewhat jerky, but he soon
had it under control. The face faded from red back to pink; the anger left it
as the lips twitched into a smile.

‘Yes, children,
please be careful, we don’t want any tragedies …’

A tragedy, I
reminded myself, was when something very bad or sad happened.

‘Or, should I say
any
more
tragedies? Children, in a moment, I’m going to introduce you to
a … let’s say a rather odd special guest, a most unusual classmate. I’d like
you to all close your eyes. Make sure they’re gripped tightly. I really
wouldn’t advise you to let me see your eyes open.’

Weirton scanned our
seated lines. I screwed my eyes up. A few seconds went by, and I heard his
shoes tap as he strode – it seemed – away from us and towards the staff area.
The shoes sounded slower coming back, and there was a trundling noise too, like
some clumsy contraption being wheeled. There was also an odd clacking, like dry
sticks clattering against each other. The trundling stopped and the clacking
subsided. After another minute, the voice rumbled.

‘Children, you may
now open your eyes.’

I sucked in breath,
gawped at the front. I blinked, struggling to take in what I saw. I shook my
head, blinked again – the sight wouldn’t go away. Weirton had once more started
striding. Like normal, his feet swivelled him round when he reached each wall.
I just gazed at the strange apparition, which refused to disappear. At the
front, looking out over the cross-legged rows, was a skeleton. The size of the
school’s biggest boys and girls, it hung from a metal frame. Its bones were
yellow-white; its skull was fixed in a gormless grinning gape. Red and blue
lines ran up its arms and down its legs. I went on staring – gazing at the
gruesomely long fingers and toes, the awful emptiness of the eye sockets.

Wrenching my gaze
away, I glanced around. Next to me, Jonathon stared with huge eyes, his breath
jerking in little gasps. I turned, looked at the other kids. Their jaws hung;
their eyes bulged. Just a few older pupils seemed less surprised, but they still
wagged their faces as if waking from a bad dream and trying to shake it away.
Weirton just continued his march forward and back, head tilted down, a smile
playing on his lips as our silence gave way to an astonished babble. Weirton
let it swell as kids asked each other whose those bones could be, where the
ghost was. Weirton halted his walk, twisted his body to face us, let his voice
rumble.

‘Children, I’m sure
you have all noticed the somewhat extraordinary student who has joined our
assembly!’

Weirton grinned; a
number of pupils let their lips quiver into smiles.

‘Yes, I’m sure most
of you are surprised to see her.’

So –
it
was
a
she
!

‘Children, I would
like to introduce you to – Lucy! Now, several years ago, Lucy was a pupil at
this school, just like you all are today.’

She’d been one of
us! Now I thought about it, I’d heard vague legends of the body of a girl kept
in the darkest part of the school’s store cupboard. And here, revealed before
us, was the proof.

‘You may wonder,’
Weirton went on, ‘how poor Lucy ended up in this sad condition. Well, let me
tell you a few things about her.’

Weirton allowed a
lull. Within me, my heart echoed. What could have turned Lucy from being like
the girls sitting around me – clothed in flesh and garments – into that rickety
figure? Weirton let his pause stretch.

‘Yes.’ He finally
broke it. ‘I’m afraid I must tell you Lucy was a very bad girl, wasn’t she Mrs
Perkins?’

‘Ooh, yes, very
bad,’ Perkins piped up from the piano.

‘She was naughty!’
Weirton’s voice started to boom. ‘Quarrelled with the other children, never
concentrated in class, wouldn’t do her work. And
this
was the result!’

His body swung –
the arm, capped with its pointing finger, thrust at Lucy.

‘Yes, children –
look at her! Look and remember her well! This is the fate that awaits the
naughty, the disobedient, the idle!’

My heart thudded on
– could such a destiny be in store for me? My mind scrabbled to understand. How
could insolence or laziness lead to … that!? I didn’t know, but the grim
evidence before us was undeniable.

‘Children, please
don’t let any of you join Lucy in her … her state! Please listen to me and your
teachers and parents, and hopefully you will all grow up to be healthy happy
adults.’

But, I wondered,
even if Lucy had died because of her many sins, why would Weirton and the
school keep the body? Wouldn’t her parents want to bury it in the spooky graveyard
on the road to Goldhill or in the even eerier one around the church at Salton?
Would Weirton even be
allowed
to store it in his cupboard? A candle of
doubt was sparked in my mind – a light which was soon snuffed by Weirton.

‘Lucy’s parents,’
he said, ‘asked the school to keep her body – and to show it occasionally to
the pupils as a warning: a warning to others tempted to follow Lucy’s path! Look
at it children – it could soon be you!’

I’d heard a legend
that without a Christian burial you couldn’t enter Heaven. All our parts had to
be preserved so God could raise us up on the Last Day. I couldn’t imagine Lucy
clanking to Heaven’s shining gate with just her bones. And how had they got rid
of all her flesh? I thought of the pipes and vats and ovens of the kitchen.

‘So remember
children,’ Weirton said, ‘if you don’t want to end up like Lucy, please, please
listen to us, accept our guidance, learn from our punishments! Now, as well as
being a warning to us all, poor Lucy’s skeleton has another use. You will
notice some marks have been painted upon it.’

So those lines
weren’t natural, weren’t daubed by God on our bones.

‘Do you ever
think,’ Weirton said, ‘about how your body works? About how God ingeniously
designed it – like a skilled craftsman putting together a machine? I’m going to
use Lucy to tell you some facts about how the body functions. So maybe Lucy’s
poor misguided life will have some purpose after all, even if that purpose has
been achieved after her death.’

Lucy grinned in
grim assent, but I couldn’t help feeling her body should have been laid in one
of our creepy cemeteries – even if she’d been a bad girl, wasn’t her current
use against God’s teachings? Wasn’t Weirton afraid of her ghost? On the other
hand, a jolt of intrigue leapt from my stomach, jerked me to attention. We
could learn something – at last, some real knowledge rather than the dreary
drift of days we usually endured. Skin tingling with guilt, begging forgiveness
from Lucy’s spirit, I leant forward, eager to hear Weirton.

‘See these red
stripes?’ Weirton’s hand traced their progress across Lucy’s bones. ‘They’re
called arteries. Arteries are tubes that carry blood towards the heart, which
would be about here.’

Weirton poked his
finger between two of Lucy’s ribs then thrust it into where her evil heart
would have sat.

‘The heart is a big
pump. It pumps blood all around the body: from the brain here’ – Weirton’s
knuckles rapped the skull – ‘to the tips of the toes.’ Weirton’s finger pointed
to the spookily long toe bones. ‘Isn’t that marvellous?’

A few shy heads
nodded.

‘Yes, God’s
handiwork is truly amazing. That’s why we should respect the bodies He’s given
us. Anyway, as I said, these red arteries, they carry the blood
towards
the heart. You see, the blood’s very tired after its long journey around the
body so the heart pumps fresh oxygen into it, which is drawn in by the lungs here.’
Weirton cupped his hands around Lucy’s ribcage. ‘All the body needs it,
especially the brain – that’s why you feel panic if, for example, you’re under
the water in the swimming pool too long. Now, your heart is always working, and
your heartbeat – that’s the movement your heart makes when it’s working as a
pump.’

I’d had no idea all
this stuff went on inside. I shuffled on my crossed legs forward a few inches –
keen to snaffle any more scraps of learning despite my banging heart, despite
my shivering fears of Lucy’s vengeful ghost, of God’s anger at how we were
using her body.

‘You only notice
your heartbeat sometimes – maybe if you’ve been running fast or perhaps when
you’re nervous you might get a walloping – but, in reality, it’s constantly
working away. Now, these blue lines’ – Weirton again used his fingers to trace
them – ‘they’re called veins and they take blood
away from
the heart …’

Weirton went on –
even saying how the blood took food around the body to keep it healthy and stop
it falling to bits. I had an image of bow-tied blood cells bearing delicious
meals on silver plates. He said the body was like a house – you had to keep
fixing it up. That’s why both old people and old houses looked so rundown. But
soon he was back onto the subject of Lucy.

‘… and so children,
look at her – if you are not good, it might soon be
you
up here,
dangling alongside Lucy as I point out arteries and veins. I can think of a few
of you
who would make good specimens!’

Weirton’s eyes
roamed over the rows – they flickered for a couple of seconds over me, rested
longer on Jonathon’s brother and Stubbs. Each of those boys got a stare – as if
Weirton were stripping away skin, flesh, clothes, gauging the bones beneath.

‘Yes,’ Weirton
said, ‘perhaps Lucy would like a little
boy
to keep her company in that
cold dark cupboard! Think on now and let poor Lucy be a lesson to you all!’

A thought echoed
through my mind. First Lucy, then Marcus! Lucy had probably gone first as
Marcus had only disappeared last summer and the legends of Lucy had been around
for a while. But someone – or something – seemed to be picking us kids off,
pouncing from deep shadows to snatch a child and carry them away who knew
where, but at least out of this life. Who could that person – or presence –
take next? I watched Weirton as he smiled in his dark suit next to Lucy.

We once more
scrambled to our feet, again gripping our hymnbooks – the ancient cover of mine
flaking in my hands. Who knew how old it was – maybe as aged as the Bible
itself? We thundered out another – resoundingly miserable – hymn, mumbled a
prayer thanking God for his great mercy, and were soon plodding out of the hall
to our classes.

The rest of the day
dragged by – the tedium of our lessons with Perkins only enlivened by the
occasional eruption from Weirton, who taught next door. In the breaks, all the
kids were chattering about Lucy – who she could have been, who remembered her,
how she might have met her end, who’d seen her ghost. Stubbs started tottering
around the playground in a stiff walk, being Lucy, clattering into other kids,
mouth fixed in a grin as he mimicked her skull’s gape. He got a few guilty
giggles and smirks, and Richard Johnson and some daft infants joined with him
in his rigid staggers, but most of the kids disapproved – Helen Jacobs saying
you shouldn’t make fun of the dead because it wasn’t very nice and you might
end up haunted by their ghosts. Stubbs just clacked and grinned at her.

Out in the
playground, no one had any doubts about Lucy, but back in the classroom – in
the dull quiet of those ticking hours – I did wonder. There were moments when I
couldn’t be convinced it was a real skeleton – maybe Weirton had sculpted it
from from wood or clay, painted it white just to scare us. But then I thought
it would be very bad if a teacher – especially a headmaster – lied so I
supposed he must have shown us a real girl’s remains. I couldn’t shake the
notion it was sinful to keep them in the school, couldn’t help worrying over
how Lucy and Marcus had died. Weirton had to know something about it – the way
he’d warned us about Marcus with such certainty, the grim knowledge he
obviously had about how Lucy’s bad behaviour had led to her demise. What else
skulked in Lucy’s cupboard; if such a fate was due to being naughty, who might
be the next to share it? Just last week Stubbs had been clobbered twice; over
the years Jonathon’s brother and Darren Hill had copped some whackings so
legendary they were permanent parts of our whispered folklore. Surely those
lads couldn’t be far off Lucy’s destiny. And, now I thought about it, Marcus
had had his share of thrashings too.

The last lesson
with Perkins dragged on, but eventually the clock ticked its slow minutes down,
and the school day ended. Jonathon and I stepped thankfully into drizzly
freedom, into the welcome scent of smoke, manure and mud that flavoured
Emberfield’s air. We scooted nervously past Marcus’s pond, turned on the pub’s
sour-smelling corner. We walked a little way along our patch of town’s main
street and when we got to one house, we reached our hands up and pushed the
middle of its wooden door. It opened; a bell clanged. Inside was a shop, with
something strangely dusky and death-like about it. It was cool, quiet, smelling
of old meat and damp paper. Little light came through the thick high windows,
but the odd beam shone – rays in which dust solemnly drifted. At Mr Weirton’s
insistence, we’d all studied the Egyptians, and somehow the place reminded me
of one of their tombs – the silence, the chill walls. The stocks of food and
other items were like the provisions that ancient people had given to their
dead for their last journeys. Maybe the sepulchral atmosphere also had to do
with the shop’s owner. He’d dodged the grave for long enough. He looked up now
as we came in – his face was dry, crinkled like old parchment; his sparse white
hair flopped; his jowls drooped; flaps of skin hung on his neck. We walked from
the door and stretched our hands up to the counter: a counter thickly carpeted
with folded newspapers. I looked at their columns of tiny print, and wondered
how many weeks it would take to decipher such documents. Just the bigger words
at the top were easier – Te-le-graph, Tele-graph, Ma-il, Mail, Mail, Da-ily,
Daily. Just the occasional one said ‘Sun’, ‘Ex-press’ or ‘Times’. I tried the
smaller letters, but as I was engaged in this complex decoding, the storekeeper
leaned across his counter and looked down at us. His jowls dangled
disapprovingly.

‘Yes, boys?’

‘Two ten-penny
mixtures, Mr Davis!’ I blurted.

‘Yeah,’ Jonathon
sang, ‘two ten-penny mixtures for me too!’

‘Didn’t your mothers
teach you any manners?’ The jowls and white hair twitched. ‘What do you say?’

‘Pleeaase!’ we both
chorused.

Slowly the
shopkeeper began to move, manipulating his old limbs. With no great urgency, he
picked up a pair of tongs, and creaked and shuffled over – to our leaping
delight – to the shelves that lined the wall behind the counter. Those shelves
supported large plastic jars of sweets.

‘No shrimps for me,
please,’ Jonathon called out, ‘but I’d like lots of cola bottles please,
especially the fizzy ones!’

‘No shrimps for me
either, please,’ I said, ‘but can I have some chocolate footballs?’

‘You should know by
now boys that, with ten-penny mixtures, you have to take what you’re given.’ The
shopkeeper’s ancient hand wagged the tongs at us. ‘And you should be grateful
for it. I hope Mr Weirton eventually succeeds in knocking some manners into you
lot …’

The shop owner
shuffled and mumbled for a while. Realising Jonathon and I were gawping too
obviously at the jars, I tried to play it cool. One hand hanging half from my
pocket, the other on my hip, I glanced around that little store – taking in the
few drab postcards of Emberfield that hung near the entrance, the meat counter
behind us, the mysterious white sarcophagi of the oblong freezers, the post
office counter at the shop’s other end with its judicious scales and what I’d
been told was the Queen’s crown above it, who I guessed was like our pharaoh –
presiding over everything. I returned my eager eyes to the sweet jars. My
display of indifference hadn’t endeared me to the shopkeeper. Now with a small
white paper bag in his veined hand, he was chuntering, as if repeating some old
charm, ‘I hope Mr Weirton knocks some bloody sense and decency into them, I
hope …’

‘He said “bloody”!’
Jonathon whispered gleefully.

The old blue eyes
swivelled slowly to face us. They clasped Jonathon in their watery stare.

‘What’s that young
Mr Browning?’ Davis’s voice trembled out. ‘Questioning your elders? I’d have
thought the little lesson you had today would’ve taught you not to do such
things.’

Still chuntering, Davis
began to turn and – after what seemed an age – he again faced the shelves and
the lid of the first jar was twisted off. To my joy, it was the chocolate
footballs.

‘Five of those
would be good, please,’ I said.

The shopkeeper
laboriously manoeuvred his head round. He wagged his finger once; scrunched his
face into an expression that insisted on quiet. With leisurely aged creaks, the
neck turned his face back to the jars. The tongs went in, captured one
chocolate football, lifted it out, dropped it in the bag. The tongs went back
and hovered for a moment over the jar’s open neck. For an epoch of indecision,
the old face looked at me. Giddy hope rose from my stomach, through my chest,
as those uncertain tongs were suspended. Then, with unquestionable finality,
the tongs jerked away, and – with sudden and surprising power – Davis smacked
the lid down on the jar and screwed it shut. My joy plummeted from throat to
belly. The old dodderer shifted to the pink candy shrimps, the dullest of sweets.
They were lacklustre, squidgy; they gave no explosions of sugary pleasure. The
gnarled hands screwed the top off the jar; again the tongs hovered. The tongs
swooped, seized a shrimp, plopped it in the bag. The tongs dived again; another
shrimp was snatched, dropped to join its companion in the sachet.

‘Oh well,’ I
thought, ‘just two – suppose I can live with that.’

Back the tongs
went; they hung over those sea creatures. In again they dived, my heart
plummeted: one, two, three, four – four! – more shrimps fell into the bag. I
had six shrimps and just one football! Now the tongs dangled above the cola
bottles – cola bottles were good; my mouth filled with sweet spit, spit almost imitating
their glorious taste.

‘Yes, I like cola
bottles!’ I said.

Davis hobbled and
shuffled his body around, again clasped us with his weak stare.

‘Now,’ he said, ‘Mr
Weirton gave you a good lesson today, but it seems you haven’t taken any notice
of it. Well, don’t say he didn’t warn you! How will you feel when next year
it’s
your
bones he wheels out in assembly?’

‘How do you know we
saw Lucy!?’ I gasped.

‘Oh, I find out
everything round here, believe you me. I’d advise you to remember Lucy and
remember her well! And to thank God you’ve got a kind teacher who’ll warn you
about such things …’

Davis turned in his
slow circle back to the jars. One – one! – measly cola bottle was fished out,
before the jar’s top was slammed down. Fizzy cola bottles next, even more
delicious – also only one. Then came fizzy bears – oh raptures, how I loved
fizzy bears: the joy of each granule as it erupted on the tongue! My teeth
nipped my lips to keep my smile from the shopkeeper. But he turned, saw the
longing in my face, so it was just one of those. As he shuffled to the next
jar, he again took up his chunter.

‘That’s how they’ll
turn out if they don’t watch themselves. Their bones will be hanging there if
they don’t mend their ways –’

‘Please, Mr Davis,’
Jonathon piped up. ‘Is Lucy a real skeleton? I was wondering if she was just a model.’

Davis turned in his
hobbling circle. The watery eyes gripped Jonathon; the shaking hand wagged the
tongs at him.

‘I can assure you
it’s no model, young fellah-me-lad! Oh no! Lucy was real – I remember her! All
Mr Weirton told you was true. A young tearaway she was. Mr Weirton did his best
with her, but she wouldn’t listen. And – well – you saw how she ended up!’

Jonathon looked
down, bit his trembling lip. There could be no doubt now about Lucy’s sad death.
But how had she got like … like that?

‘Please Mr Davis,’
I said. ‘How did Lucy die?’

‘Got cloth ears,
have you? Mr Weirton explained it all this morning. It was through being a bad
girl. And one or two others had better watch their step! There’s that brother
of young Mr Browning’s for a start! Mr Weirton must have worn his hand out on
that one over the years! They say that sort of bad behaviour runs in families,
you know!’

‘But, please Sir,
I’m not like him!’ Jonathon’s voice shot high with protest.

‘Oh, that’s what
you
say.’ Davis shuffled over to the next jar – candied fried eggs, pretty boring,
one of which his tongs grasped to complete my first ten-penny mixture. ‘That’s
what
you
say, but these things
do
run in families. Bad genes or
whatever …’

I wasn’t sure what
Jonathon’s trousers had to do with it, but Davis went on.

‘When
I
was
at school, if a lad got walloped, they’d often give his brother some too – stop
him getting any bright ideas …’

Jonathon and I
swapped a wide-eyed look. Davis must have been at school so long ago – had they
actually had schools in the Olden Days?

‘Wouldn’t hurt
young Mr Browning,’ the old voice trembled on, ‘if Mr Weirton got into the
habit of saving one or two strikes for him …’

But I wanted to get
the talk back onto what had happened to our dead classmates. I ventured a
question.

‘Please, Mr Davis,
do you know what happened to Marcus?’

‘Marcus, Marcus
Jones? Disappeared suddenly that lad, didn’t he? No, can’t say I know where he
went. Now
he
was a bad ’un, always in bother with Mr Weirton – wouldn’t
surprise me if that boy ended up sharing Lucy’s fate!’

Jonathon and I
gawped at each other, but Mr Davis – putting my full bag to one side – took up
an empty one. My joy soared with the delicious rustle he made by separating its
two paper sheathes. I wrestled to hide my eagerness, but Davis looked down at
me and his blue eyes drank it in. He turned back to the still open egg jar –
plop, plop, plop, plop: four – four! – eggs went into my bag. Next came a
gobstopper – OK, I suppose, and – more excitingly – a couple of liquorice
shoelaces. I could enjoy their earthily pungent charms. I exulted in one – just
one – cherry-red string, again encrusted with sugary explosions, before one
dull mint was added, a drab pebble I’d probably donate to my dad. I hurriedly
counted up on my fingers – reckoned I had only one sweet to go. The shopkeeper
turned, looked long at me then spent some time surveying his collection of
jars. There were a few sweets I’d have settled for – those chewy yellow squares
that always had the danger of tugging out your fillings, the satisfying
soil-like tang of the blackjacks – each suggestively shielded in its own
wrapper, even the pasty cloying taste of those larger jelly babies. Tongs
poised, the shopkeeper’s drooping face pondered. The jar of shrimps was
unscrewed and one final unwanted shellfish dropped into my bag.

‘That’s twenty
pence, please,’ the old man said.

Disappointment
weighting my chest, I handed over the two coins my palm had been gripping. That
was my treasury bankrupt for another week.

It was Jonathon’s turn.
As with me, Davis dithered around the jars, hanging his tongs above the tasty
sweets as he watched Jonathon’s mouth curve, his face beam in the dusky shop.
Davis did the same with the dull candies, his watery gaze watching as
Jonathon’s lips drooped, as disappointment dimmed his eyes. But at first, Jonathon
didn’t do too badly – four normal cola bottles, one fizzy one, a chocolate
football, two fizzy bears, even a flying saucer! A flying saucer – two domes of
rice paper formed that star-ship, a ship that carried the most incredible
cargo: sherbet that would fizz and bang with unearthly power on the tongue for
ages. I gawped with envy as it fluttered into Jonathon’s bag. But as Davis
shuffled to the next jar – of gobstoppers, I think – my attention was drawn
back to the newspapers. I struggled with their stern print, the tiny letters
almost as difficult as the Egyptians’ picture writing. But concentration
screwed my brow; I summoned up more effort and was soon silently spelling stuff
out: ri-ots, st-ri-kes, in-fl-at-ion, out-rag-eous de-mands. I smiled at my
success, but just wondered what was meant by the mysterious words those signs
formed.