3
Michaelmas Term, 1981
‘What do you mean, possession?’ I said, perhaps a little too sharply. ‘As in nine-tenths of the law, perchance?’
He shook his head. ‘No, sir.’
‘Then what?’
Of course, by then I already knew that young Harrington’s parents were deeply religious. They belonged to a local outfit, rather too modern for my taste, called the Church of the Omega Rose, which was housed in a modest square building down in Malbry Village. The Satanic Mr Speight was a regular visitor, as were a number of our boys. Beyond that information, I hadn’t given the place too much thought.
I myself am Church of England by habit, birth and nostalgia; I go to church at Christmas because I happen to like it, and because I enjoy the hymns, but would never describe myself as devout. I tend to believe that certain ideas (love, charity, and the like) are worth promoting, while others (such as stoning, narrow-mindedness, demons, fasting, original sin and contempt for those who are different) are best left to wither quietly on one of the dying branches of faith. Others, I knew, did not agree. Harrington Senior was one of them.
‘You mean, demonic possession?’ I said.
Harrington nodded. ‘Yes, sir.’
I had to laugh. I thought the boy looked slightly offended.
‘I’m sorry,’ I told him. ‘Please go on. You were telling me about – your friend.’
‘Well, sir. He has all the signs. Mood swings, nervous tics, bad skin, obsessed with death—’
‘That’s adolescence, Harrington. I think you’ll find that’s normal.’
The joke, mild as it was, failed to melt his composure. ‘Sir. It isn’t normal. He thinks about it all the time. He keeps saying he’s going to die, and then he’s going to burn in Hell and there’s nothing anyone can do.’
That made me sit up a bit. Unlike the girls of Mulberry House, my boys were not generally prone to fits of excessive sensibility. Harrington didn’t seem the type to indulge in morbid thoughts, but nevertheless, I told myself, this might be a cry for attention. I found myself checking his face for blemishes, but apart from a single spot on his chin, the boy seemed remarkably acne-free.
‘Is – your friend – a believer?’ I said.
‘He used to be,’ said Harrington. ‘Now, I don’t know what he is.’
‘And do you know of any reason he might be feeling – unhappy?’
He shook his head. ‘He’s not unhappy, exactly. My father says there’s something missing in him. Like a light’s been turned out.’
‘He thinks there’s a problem, then?’
Harrington shrugged. ‘He thinks we should pray. That’s his answer to everything.’
I said: ‘The idea of possession doesn’t have to be literal. When you say something like: What’s got into you? you really mean: Is there anything wrong? And when you say: I’m not myself—’
‘Sir, it isn’t me, sir.’
I lied. ‘Of course I believe you. But if you can’t tell me the name of your friend, or why you think he may be—’
‘Possessed.’
‘Quite.’ I was starting to wonder now whether this might all be some kind of joke. But Harrington’s agitation was real. I would have bet my life on it.
The boy gave me a sideways look. ‘Sir. You don’t believe, sir.’
‘Do you?’
I thought he flinched at that. ‘I only want to help, sir.’
I only want to help, he said. Who wouldn’t have believed him then? Sincerity tempered with awkwardness – and just the right amount of concern.
‘Then why not tell me the name of your friend?’ I asked, just as the lesson bell went. Outside, in the corridor, came the sounds of activity. Harrington glanced at the door. For a moment, I thought I saw a shadow of something cross his face. Had he seen someone standing there? Someone he wanted to avoid?
‘Look at me, Harrington,’ I said.
Obediently, he turned to me. Through the frosted glass of the door, I could see boys lining up for class. Had one of them made a sign? Was a member of staff with them? There was no way of telling.
‘Come on, Harrington,’ I said. ‘How can I do anything to help unless I know who we’re discussing?’
‘I thought you’d be able to find out. Now that you know what to look for, I mean. It wouldn’t have to come from me. You could find out by accident.’
‘By accident?’ I said. I suppose I still hoped for a confession. The whole ‘my friend has a problem’ line was old when Noah was a boy. But something had changed, I realized. In that interval, brief as it was, Harrington had recovered his poise. Perhaps he’d seen someone through the glass; perhaps he’d simply got cold feet. But the look of vulnerability I’d thought I’d glimpsed in his face was gone; instead, the old aloofness was back, as bland and hateful as ever.
I gave it one last try. ‘Are you sure that’s all you can tell me?’
He nodded. ‘Yes, sir. I’ve got to be in Maths, sir.’
I sighed. ‘Adolescence is difficult. Boys can get angry and confused. That doesn’t mean they’re all possessed. It’s just – well. Hormones. Teenage angst. What my colleague Dr Devine undoubtedly refers to as Weltschmerz.’
Harrington picked up his briefcase. ‘Thank you. I feel better now. Sorry I took up so much of your time.’
I thought about what he’d said all day.
Possession? Demonic possession?
Of course I didn’t believe him. Perhaps he didn’t expect me to: Harrington was clever enough to choose his targets appropriately, and if he had really intended to sell someone an outlandish idea, he would have gone straight to Dr Burke, or better still, to St Oswald’s own version of the Witchfinder General, the Satanic Mr Speight, whose interest in all things occult rivalled even the Chaplain’s.
No, I concluded; Harrington had come to me for a reason. Perhaps he even meant for me to disregard this far-fetched hypothesis. Perhaps mine was to be the voice of good sense when everyone else was losing their head. Which made me wonder whether he really believed in the nonsense, or whether this was an oblique way of trying to warn me about something entirely different. In any case, Parents’ Evenings were imminent, and if Johnny Harrington – or one of his friends – was having emotional difficulties, now was the time to find out why.
A good form-master knows how to delve without seeming to question openly; he knows when to use the velvet glove and when to deploy the iron fist. He knows when to tackle a problem head-on and when to skirt it delicately; in short, a good form-master has to be part detective, part social worker, part saint. I am not that Master. My general pedagogic approach is based on a policy of benevolent neglect – it works in the case of most boys, but neither Harrington nor his friends seemed to respond to my methods. No, I needed someone else; someone who spoke the boy’s language; someone who had the authority, but also the humanity, to cross the gulf between Master and pupil. I knew who I needed; a man who had earned the boys’ liking and trust; someone who knew them better than I; someone who could advise us both.
And so, at the end of the morning, I went in search of Harry Clarke.
4
Michaelmas Term, 1971
I remember arriving in ’71 as a Junior Master. Eric Scoones had been there two years. In fact, he was the reason that I’d applied for the job in the first place; Eric and I had been good friends ever since we were schoolboys. Now we were newbies together again – along with the young Dr Devine, an Alka-Seltzer of a man, fresh out of college and fizzing with energy and ambition.
So many things have changed since then; and yet, at the same time, nothing has. We still live in isolation, like goldfish in a series of tanks, moving in the same circles, term after term, year after year. Nothing much ever happens here – and when something does, it happens with the suddenness of a dropped stone falling into the water, leaving a series of ripples that all too soon smooth over.
I first encountered Harry Clarke near the end of my first half-term. St O
swald’s staff do not generally fraternize with members of other departments, and Harry Clarke, although his form-room was directly above my own, was attached to a department that was famously antisocial, of which the head was Mr Fabricant, an Oxford man with an eye twitch, who in his youth had written a book on the life of the Marquis de Sade, thereby earning himself an undeserved reputation for sexual permissiveness. As a result I barely knew Harry Clarke, except as a face in the Common Room, to which he rarely came, except at Headmaster’s Meetings. That day, I’d gone into room 54 – that was Dr Devine’s room, the next one along the corridor from mine – to borrow a box of coloured chalks. For some reason the German Department had them all, and was stockpiling them in the back of Devine’s store cupboard. Well, when I say ‘borrow’ – I was hoping Devine would be out. From what I already knew of him, he wasn’t the philanthropic type.
Sadly, he, too, liked to arrive in School at seven thirty, and would sit at his desk, drink a single cup of black coffee (using the School china, of course) and mark books until the boys came in. That late-October morning, however, I found him with his back to me, standing on the lid of his desk, holding a garden gnome in one hand and looking both furtive and furious.
He turned, startled, as I came in. ‘Straitley!’
‘Oh. Hello,’ I said.
He looked at me with annoyance. Dr Devine as a young man looked much the same as he does now – the eyes a little brighter, perhaps; the nose a little more sensitive. We had disliked each other on sight, with the instinctive recognition of two antagonistic species. Everything in his form-room was the antithesis of my own: the neatness of his bookshelves; the gown that hung on a clothes hanger behind the door; the pristine blackboard, wiped with a sponge rather than a messy board-rubber; the posters of famous Germans neatly pinned to the noticeboards.
In such Teutonic surroundings, I was surprised to see the gnome. One of those painted plaster affairs, wearing a dissipated grin and what looked like an Amadeus House tie. Dr Devine climbed down from the desk and put the gnome in his briefcase.
‘It isn’t mine, of course,’ he said. He sounded annoyed at having to explain. ‘I found it there this morning.’ He spoke in a sharp, percussive tone, like a talking typewriter. ‘In fact, I’ve been finding it around every day for the past two weeks. It’s someone’s silly idea of a joke. And when I find out who’s been doing it—’
I grinned. I couldn’t help it.
‘Well, I’m glad you think it’s funny,’ he said. ‘Because clearly you have no idea how disruptive it can be, when you’re trying to teach a class, to open a cupboard, or to pull out a dictionary from a shelf, or to look inside a desk drawer and see that thing grinning out at you. Today it was balanced above the door. It could have caused an injury.’
I bit my lip. ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘But – couldn’t you just throw it away?’
‘You think I haven’t tried that?’ said Devine impatiently. ‘Whoever it is keeps retrieving it. Last week I found it outside my door – on my doorstep, Straitley – holding a German sausage. Someone actually came to my house. This has gone beyond a joke. And when I find out who’s doing it—’
I schooled my countenance to reflect nothing but solemnity. ‘Quite right.’ I stifled a cough. ‘Er, have you discovered a motive?’
Devine looked affronted. ‘A motive?’
My words were not idle. Since the start of that term, Devine had already put into detention fourteen boys in my form alone, as well as lodging several complaints against his neighbours along the Upper Corridor for such various crimes as playing music at lunchtime; failing to tidy his room after use; stealing his chalks; moving his plants and failing to wear a gown to morning Assembly. Dr Shakeshafte famously referred to him as ‘that little shit’, and the boys had already given him his current nickname of Sourgrape.
‘What possible reason could there be, except the desire to disrupt?’ he said.
I shook my head and returned to my room – sensing that my request for chalk would be met with a cool reception. Instead I went up to room 58, which was Harry Clarke’s room, and from which the sound of music emerged dimly, from behind the door.
I knocked and went in. A rail-thin, untidy young man in round glasses and a Harris Tweed jacket was trying to fit a cardboard box under a desk that was already stacked with boxes of records, towers of books and a portable record player.
He looked up as I came in. ‘You’re from downstairs, aren’t you?’ he said.
‘Straitley, Latin,’ I told him.
‘Harry Clarke. English Lit.’ He grinned. ‘For a moment I thought you were that German chap, complaining about my music again. I’ve been expecting him any time over the past two weeks. I was going to play him this—’
He grinned again and took a record from the pile on his desk. He slipped it on to the turntable and waited for the song to begin. A sunny little tune rang out. Then I glanced into the cardboard box that he’d slid under the desk, and saw a row of plaster gnomes, neatly packed in polythene, all of them identical to the one I’d seen in Devine’s hand—
The record on the turntable went on playing that bright little tune. I recognized the piece as one by the singer David Bowie. After a time I started to laugh, and Harry Clarke laughed with me.
The song was, of course, ‘The Laughing Gnome’.
5
Michaelmas Term, 1981
Dear Mousey,
The end-of-term exam results are out. I’ve got As in History, Maths, RE, Geography, Latin and Chemistry. English was a C (boo-hoo), and French was disastrous – not because I’m bad at French, but because on the day of the exam I was feeling particularly bored. And so, instead of the essay that Mr Scoones had asked us to write (Racontez ce que vous avez fait pendant vos vacances), I wrote an account of a murder (un meurtre) that I’d committed at the weekend, and how I’d disposed of the body (le cadavre) by cutting it into tiny pieces (en petits morceaux) and leaving them in the school kitchens, where they were speedily incorporated (rapidement incorporés) into a batch of shepherd’s pie.
Turns out Mr Scoones doesn’t have that kind of sense of humour. Besides the note to my parents, which was bad enough, I’ve got two weeks’ lunchtime detention, starting from next Monday, which means that I won’t see Harry again until after the Christmas holidays. Funny, how quickly I’ve got used to these lunchtime sessions of Harry’s. I’ll miss them, Mousey. I’ll miss him. Stupid, pompous Mr Scoones.
Meanwhile, Poodle’s up to no good. He didn’t do well in his exams. I saw his Chemistry paper, all covered in those doodles that he’s always drawing in class. Plus he isn’t happy here. You can tell from watching him. There are patches of eczema on his fingers and up his arms, and acne on his forehead. (My dad thinks acne’s a sign of self-abuse.) And he’s started avoiding me before school and at lunchtimes. After school, he sneaks away before you can try and talk to him. I wonder if it was something I said – maybe that day in Harry’s room. Or something preying on his mind. Something or someone, Mousey.
Some people are good at hiding things. Some are better at finding things out. I’m good at both, actually. Which is why, when he left school today, I followed him at a distance. I could tell straight away he wasn’t going home. He lives on the far side of the park, at the top of Millionaires’ Row. But I could see he was heading for the other side of the Village; Sunnybank Park, the White City estate, and all the waste land that comes after.
Poodle’s very secretive. I had to be careful not to be seen. But I thought I knew where he was going, and it turned out I was right. There’s a place on a piece of waste land, down behind the White City estate. There’s a bit of canal there, and some grassed-over slag heaps. There’s a quarry filled with brambles, then there’s a bridge, then an old metal gate, and then, beyond that, there’s the clay pits. This is Poodle’s secret place, where he does his secret things. And the reason I know this, Mousey, is that it used to be our place, as well.
There must have been over a dozen p
its, once. Some were up to a hundred feet deep. They used to climb down to the bottom on ropes and send up the clay in buckets. Now the pits are all flooded out, and people use the place as a dump. I’ve given all the flooded pits names. The biggest is the Long Pond, and people sometimes go fishing there, among the old cars and abandoned junk. It’s safe enough, if you stay on the low end of the bank. The water’s shallow. You can play boats. But some of the other pits are deep, and the bank gets slippery in the rain. There’s one that I call the Pit Shaft. It’s only a few dozen feet across. But the bank is so steep that if you fell in, you’d probably not get out again. Sometimes you see animals that have made that mistake. Drowned rats; even dogs. I stay away from the Pit Shaft now. Then there’s the Crescent; the Sugar Bowl; the Three Little Injuns and the Sink. None of those are completely safe, except for the Crescent, which is mostly filled in, with just a deeper bit at one end. Elsewhere by the clay pits, there are old abandoned cars, and shopping trolleys, and carpets, and piles of wooden pallets and crates, and bundles of comics and magazines. Even ovens and fridges, too, and TV sets with the fuses blown. It’s a good place if you need somewhere to hide, or to meet the kind of people that your parents might not approve of. I could tell by the way he approached that Poodle went there all the time.
I can walk pretty quietly. I managed to get right up close to Poodle before he realized I was there. I hid behind a big rock and watched as he made himself comfortable. He was sitting inside a rusted old car, reading a copy of Razzle. He looked like he was expecting someone.
He jumped when he finally saw me, and tried to hide the magazine. ‘Oh. It’s you, Ziggy,’ he said.