Border Crossing

‘The whole school was reorganized round him. Everybody thought he was bright, just talking to him, you could tell, but they did a battery of tests and realized he was very bright, so that meant an academic course. A lot of the time he was taught on his own, one to one. Most of the time here we’re coping with illiteracy.’

  ‘But that was inevitable, wasn’t it?’

  She nodded. ‘Yes. And of course he was a child. People responded to him as a child. His housemother fell in love with him. I don’t think that’s putting it too strongly. No children of her own, and suddenly there’s this beautiful little boy. He was beautiful.’

  ‘But it didn’t stop there, did it? I think you’re… well, I think you’re implying Danny worked the system.’

  ‘Like otters swim. I think most of the time he was so good, nobody saw him doing it. In any relationship, but especially with an adult, he had to be in control. And – well, I think this is why he wasn’t spotted – it wasn’t control as a way of getting something, it was control for its own sake. Little things… it’s a rule the boys don’t call staff by their first names. Bernard’s a great believer in keeping a certain distance, he thinks it’s a mistake to start coming across as somebody’s best mate. Danny used everybody’s first name. And of course it didn’t matter. Except. Another rule: you’re not supposed to be alone with them. If you’re teaching one to one – and everybody who taught Danny did -the door’s supposed to be left open. Either that, or you do it in a corner of the library. With Danny the doors were closed. Not because anything… wrong was happening. It wasn’t. But he’d be telling them something, he’d be confiding in them, he didn’t want anybody else to hear, and they’d be flattered, they’d think: This is great, we’re making progress. I’m the one who’s broken through. And you see the reallydevilish thing? Danny wasn’t breaking the rules. They were. He was very, very good at getting people to step across that invisible border. Lambs to the slaughter.’

  ‘And one Aberdeen Angus bull.’

  She looked surprised, but recovered quickly. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did he do all this to women as well?’

  ‘He did it to everybody.’

  ‘Including Mr Greene?’

  ‘Yes. That’s when I first noticed him doing it. I don’t suppose you… no, you wouldn’t. My husband has a, well, a distinctive walk. Danny started imitating it. And there he was, bustling round the school like a miniature headmaster, it was… very funny to watch, and I think most people thought it was a good thing. Bit of hero-worship.’ She paused. ‘I didn’t like it.’

  ‘And where did Angus fit into all this?’

  ‘Oh, he came much later. Danny was fifteen.’

  A short silence. ‘But the same thing?’

  ‘Plus.’

  A long silence. Tom said, ‘Did he imitate Angus?’

  ‘The accent. Angus was very Scottish.’

  ‘And a good teacher?’

  ‘Very. Though whether he was suited to this sort of work…’ She seemed to come to a decision. ‘Danny started mimicking him, anyway that’s what Angus thought, and he cracked down on Danny pretty hard. He’d no experience with disturbed kids, he treated them as a normal class. Little sprog plays up. Crack down. But you can’t do that here. To any of them,but especially not Danny. You see, all the other kids were on a points system. The.more points for good behaviour, the sooner they got out. But not Danny.’

  ‘Danny wasn’t going anywhere.’

  ‘That’s right. Life. He didn’t know how long life was going to be, but he knew it was going to be a helluva long time, and he knew being a good boy in English lessons wasn’t going to get him out of anything. So when Angus cracked down, Danny freaked out. Bounced himself off the walls, tried to break the windows, threw things, generally went berserk. And suddenly it wasn’t a normal class.’

  ‘What did Angus do?’

  ‘Saw him afterwards. Alone.’

  ‘With the door closed.’

  ‘I shouldn’t be at all surprised.’

  ‘And then he got Danny writing about his childhood?’

  ‘Yes. I don’t think he was trying to get at the murder, though I don’t know where else he thought it was leading.’

  ‘You obviously think it was a bad idea.’

  ‘Well, from Angus’s point of view, yes. You do know Danny accused him of sexual abuse? He had to leave.’

  ‘No, I didn’t know,’

  Tom was almost too surprised to speak, and the more he thought about it, the more baffled he became. Danny’s silence might be explicable, but what abouGreene’s? What about Martha’s? There was no way this wouldn’t be on the file. Unless… ‘Was there an inquiry?’

  ‘No. Angus was on a one-year contract. It all blew up towards the end of the summer term. He left a bit early.’

  ‘With references?’

  ‘That I can’t tell you.’

  ‘And the stabbing? Mr Greene said –’

  ‘Attempted stabbing.’ She shrugged. ‘Incidents like that happen here all the time.’

  ‘What caused it?’

  ‘The other boy said, “Everybody knows you’re MacDonald’s bum boy.” ‘

  ‘So it was about Angus?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you believe there was a sexual assault?’

  She pursed her lips. ‘There may have been a relationship. Not that I’m justifying it for a minute, but… Angus wasn’t the only person to leave over Danny. I can think of another four.’

  ‘Who had relationships?’

  ‘No, no, just got over-involved. You’d be amazed how many people didn’t believe Danny had killed that woman. When he tried to stab the boy in the woodwork class, the teacher who was taking the class was absolutely shattered. Not by the incident – by what he saw in Danny, because he was one of the ones who couldn’t believe he was guilty. Danny didn’tpick fights, you see. So it was easy for people to slip into thinking he wasn’t violent. And this teacher said he thought, My God, there it is.’

  The tea was cold. ‘Would you like another?’

  ‘I’m taking up a lot of your time.’

  ‘Nothing’s spoiling. I’ll put the kettle on.’

  She got up and began moving around. Tom watched her thinking that he still had no real idea what she felt about Danny. ‘I’m interested in what you were saying about Danny’s mimicry. If that’s the right word.’

  ‘No, it was more than that. He…’ She groped for the right word. ‘Borrowed other people’s lives. He… it was almost as if he had no shape of his own, so he wrapped himself round other people. And what you got was a… a sort of composite person. He observed people, he knew a lot about them, and at the same time he didn’t know anything because he was always looking at this mirror image. And of course everybody let him down, because you couldn’t not let Danny down. Being a separate person was a betrayal. And then you got absolute rage. Angus had no idea what he was tangling with.’

  ‘You really didn’t like him, did you?’

  A short laugh. ‘I thought he was one of the most dangerous boys we’ve ever had through the school. Bernard thinks we transformed him. I don’t think we even scratched the surface. Or, if anybody did, it was Angus, and look what happened to him.’

  ‘Do you know what did happen to him?’

  ‘Angus? He runs some sort of writers’ centre. So he stayed in teaching, that’s one good thing.’

  ‘Do you think I could have the address?’

  ‘Yeah, hang on a sec, I’ll get it.’

  He went to the patio doors and stood looking over the garden, while she turned over papers in a drawer. Green lawns, rose bushes, blue shadows creeping over the grass. Beyond the trees, the smooth, windowless walls of the secure unit, as disturbing, in the fading light, as a face without eyes.

  ‘We used to live in there,’ she said, coming back. ‘Can you imagine? Bernard said it did the boys good to have a normal family living with them. I’m afraid I had to put my foot down, and point out that the normal family wasn’
t going to stay normal if we didn’t get a bit of privacy.’

  ‘It must get quite claustrophobic’

  ‘It certainly does.’ She held out a piece of paper. ‘Here you are. North Yorkshire. Somehow I always thought he’d go back to Scotland.’

  He thanked her and shortly afterwards left. She stood at the door, watching him go, and then, as he started to reverse the car, came out into the drive.

  ‘Be careful, won’t you?’ she said. And he knew she wasn’t referring to the fading light and the long drive.

  FOURTEEN

  Towards evening it came on to rain. The river was a confusion of overlapping rings and bubbles, too turbulent to reflect the blackening sky. Tom looked back into the room. ‘I’ve been to Long Garth.’

  ‘Did you see Mr Greene?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Danny smiled. ‘I won’t ask what you thought of him.’

  ‘More to the point, what did you think of him?’

  ‘Idealistic. Naїve.’ A slight pause. ‘Vain.’

  ‘No, I meant when you arrived. When you were eleven.’

  ‘I admired him, I think. He was like my father. In some ways. Very upright, clean, organized. There was absolute clarity at that school, and it came from him. You knew what the rules were, what the rewards were, what the punishments were, and it was always the same, and it was the same for everybody. You felt safe. I know a lot of people would say the regime there was pretty inadequate. But… you’ve got to start with the basics. You can’t do anything in a place like that unless people feel safe. And we did. We were supervised round the clock. You couldn’t go to the lavatory on your own, you couldn’t close your door, you weren’t allowed to be alone with anybody, you couldn’t go out… It was absolutely bloody terrible, I hated it, but it worked.’

  ‘And you met Angus?’

  Danny looked surprised. ‘Did Greene talk about him?’

  ‘His wife did.’

  ‘Oh yes. Elspeth. She didn’t like me very much.’

  ‘Why do you think she didn’t like you?’

  ‘Not partial to murderers?’

  Tom let the silence deepen round the attempted flippancy of that remark. Then, ‘Tell me a bit more about Angus.’

  ‘I don’t know that there’s much to tell.’ He was staring at Tom, perhaps trying to work out how much he already knew. ‘He was a brilliant teacher.’

  ‘Tell me about his teaching methods, then. What did he ask you to write about?’

  ‘Usual stuff. A Storm at Sea. Masses of purple prose. And then one day he said, “Write about your granddad,” and I wrote about the day my grandfather died.’ Danny was reaching for another cigarette. ‘I hadn’t thought about it for years. He came into the kitchen talking about rabbits, thousands of them, he said, all over the top field, and there were drops of sweat on top of his bald head, grey, like dirty rain. And by midnight he was dead.’

  ‘Of?’

  ‘Pneumonia. Old man’s friend.’

  Danny seemed to have ground to a halt. Tom said, ‘What else did you write about?’

  A smile. ‘ “My Pet”.’

  ‘Duke.’

  ‘Yes. He was a bull mastiff, and he was kept chained up in the paddock by the side of the house. He used to watch the geese walk past on their way to the pond. One year he got one, just before Christmas. My grandmother said he’d watched them getting fatter. Quite old, smelly, ropes of saliva hanging from his jaws.’

  ‘Did you love him?’

  A blank look. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Why was he kept chained?’

  ‘Because Dad liked the idea of a powerful dog, but he didn’t want the grind of training it. Like a lot of things about Dad, it was all show. And when he left home he left the dog behind.’ He laughed. ‘I think I was more shocked by that than his leaving me behind. Anyway, the dog was too big for my mother to cope with. My grandmother felt sorry for him and took him for a walk, and he dragged her through a bed of nettles. So he was given to a man who ran a scrap-metal yard. I used to go and see him in the school lunch hour, and there were notices all over the place. “Beware of the Dog.” There was a little kennel, too small for him to get into, and a bowl with no water in it. I told the other kids it was my dog and they didn’t believe me. I went up and put my arms round him, and he stank. He was hot, he was slobbery, he was a horrible dog. I started to cry.’

  ‘And that’s what you wrote about?’

  ‘Yes, and then the battery hens, and the pigs on the next farm. And in the end Angus said, “But I can’t see the people.” And of course he was right. No bloody way was I doing the people.’

  ‘So how did he get you on to that?’

  ‘He said, “Does your father use an electric razor?” And I said, “No,” and he said, “Tell me about your father shaving.” Well, that was always a time of enormous tension, because he didn’t shave in the mornings if he was going to be on the farm all day, he shaved in the evenings before he went out. I’d be sitting with my mother in the living room on this leather sofa we had. If you were in short trousers the backs of your legs stuck to the seat, and when you stood up you really yelped. And my mother would be sitting in the armchair, pleating her skirt. On and on, making pleats, smoothing them out, making them again, and… not saying anything. And there’d be this bluthering and spluthering from the kitchen. He always got ready at the kitchen sink, almost as if he was trying to start a row. Because, you know, because he was going to the pub, and he was going to be spending money we didn’t have, buying rounds for people who laughed at him behind his back. And there’d be this… tension.’

  ‘Did they fight? I mean, did he hit her?’

  ‘No, he hit me. He hit me to get at her.’

  ‘So Angus was pressing on some raw spots.’

  ‘Oh, it was dynamite. I mean, I’d totally blocked off the past. I didn’t have any explanation for why I was in the secure unit. I was just there. I wasn’t there because I’d done anything wrong. I believed my own story.’

  ‘So why did you go on writing about the past? You could’ve stopped.’

  Danny shifted in his chair. ‘I think…’ A sigh. ‘I think I got addicted to the… intensity of it.’

  ‘Did you feel it was dangerous?’

  ‘God, yes. What the fuck did he think he was doing? Because you look at what he did, he took somebody with hypothermia, and put them next to a blazing hot fire. As soon as the feeling starts to come back, they scream their bloody heads off.’

  ‘Yeah, I can see that. But then, the other thing you don’t do with hypothermia is to leave people in the Snow.’

  ‘No, I know. No, I know it had to be done. And then he fell in love with me, and that didn’t help.’

  ‘When did you realize he was in love with you?’

  ‘Quite late. I’m not sure I knew at-all till after I’d left. If you mean when did I realize he wanted to fuck me, about five minutes after we met.’

  ‘And he made love to you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How on earth did you manage that? You were supervised every minute of the day, locked in at night…

  ‘Well, he was doing the supervising, wasn’t he?’

  ‘And how long did this go on?’

  ‘Two months? Not long.’

  ‘Do you remember how it started?’

  ‘I was walking past the window of his room, the room where he taught, and I tapped on the glass. He was sitting at the desk, marking books, and he waved to me to come in. And we talked. And that was all we did. But we were alone, and it was an absolute rule that we shouldn’t be, and we both knew that. So there was this casual conversation going on, totally innocent, and at the same time… And then he had to go to a meeting, and that was that. Except he knew I’d tap on the window again, and I knew that when I did he’d wave to me to come in.’ Danny smiled. ‘It was all so bloody repressed you wouldn’t believe. Talk about Jane Austen. And it went on like that for quite a long time. And then one day I brushed against him, del
iberately of course…’ He shrugged.

  ‘But then the headmaster found out?’

  Danny looked surprised, almost as if he’d forgotten how the affair ended. ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  ‘And Angus lost his job.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you tell the headmaster?’

  ‘No, I told another teacher. She told him.’

  ‘And there was no inquiry?’

  ‘Nobody wanted one. Angus certainly didn’t.’

  ‘And that meant no more digging into the past?’

  ‘Yes. Till now.’

  Tom took the hint. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Your father had just left home and you were searching for the present you thought he must’ve left for you, and you found his binoculars.’

  ‘And more or less went to bed with them for the next three months.’

  ‘You also said you looked at your mother through the wrong end and she was tiny like a beetle and you didn’t have to feel sorry for her. Did you feel sorry? It implies there was a problem.’

  ‘Well, yes. It would’ve been a hard life for a woman, at the best of times, but she’d had a mastectomy. She’d lost her hair. She’d lost her husband. For Christ’s sake. That Christmas she got one of the neighbours to kill the geese, and she sat in the shed till midnight plucking them. I went in, and the draught from the door made all the feathers rise up, and they take ages to settle. And when you looked at them every one of them had a little plug of blood at the end of the spine. I tried pulling some of them out, but of course I got bored, and she says, “It’s all right, son. You go to bed.” It was freezing in the shed. And the skin was this horrible dingy yellow, pimply, cold.’ He pulled a face. ‘I hated her because I couldn’t help her.’

  The word ‘hate’ seemed to liberate him. 1 hated her because she couldn’t keep him. I hated her for being ill and miserable and bald and ugly and old. I hated the way her nose went red when she cried. And at the same time I was frightened she was going to die. Only even that was mixed because at the back of my mind there was a fantasy: if she dies he’ll have to come and get me.’

  ‘And it was just the two of you?’

  ‘Yes, till the cancer came back and she had to have another mastectomy. And then my grandparents came and lived with us. I don’t know how she’d have managed otherwise.’