Still, amusing though it may be, this remains a small diversion. St. Oswald’s has withstood a thousand petty dramas of the same ilk. My second week has passed; I am more than comfortable in my role; and although I am tempted to enjoy my newfound situation for a little longer, I know that there will be no better time to strike. But where?
Not Bishop; not the Head. Straitley? It’s tempting, and he’ll have to go sooner or later; but I’m enjoying the game too much to lose him so soon. No. There’s really only one place to start. The Porter.
That had been a bad summer for John Snyde. He had been drinking more than ever before, and at last it was beginning to show. Always a big man, he had thickened gradually and almost imperceptibly over the years, and now, quite suddenly, it seemed, he was fat.
For the first time I was conscious of it; conscious of the St. Oswald’s boys passing the gates; conscious of my father’s slowness, of his bloodshot eyes, of his bearish, sullen temper. Though it rarely came out in work hours, I knew it was there, like an underground wasps’ nest waiting for something to disturb it.
Dr. Tidy, the Bursar, had commented on it, although so far my father had avoided an official reprimand. The boys knew it too, especially the little ones; over that summer they baited him mercilessly, shouting, John! Hey John! in their girlish voices, following him in groups as he attended to his duties, running after the ride-on lawn mower as he drove it methodically around the cricket fields and football pitches, his big bear’s rump hanging off either side of the narrow seat.
He had a multitude of nicknames: Johnny Fatso; Baldy John (he had become sensitive about the thinning patch on top of his head, which he tried to camouflage by greasing a long strip of hair to his crown); Doughball Joe; Big John the Chip-Fat Don. The ride-on lawn mower was a perpetual source of merriment; they called it the Mean Machine or John’s Jalopy; it was continually breaking down; rumor had it that it ran off the chip fat that John used to grease his hair; that he drove it because it was faster than his own car. A few times, boys had noticed a beery, stale smell on my father’s breath in the mornings, and since then there had been numerous halitosis jokes; boys pretending to become inebriated on the fumes from the caretaker’s breath; boys asking how far over the limit he was, and whether he was legal to drive the Mean Machine.
Needless to say I usually kept my distance from these boys during my forays into school; for although I was certain my father never even saw beyond the St. Oswald’s uniform to the individuals beneath, his proximity made me uneasy and ashamed. It seemed at these times that I had never really seen my father before; and when, goaded finally into undignified response, he lashed out—first with his voice, and then with his fists—I writhed with embarrassment, shame, and self-loathing.
Much of this was the direct result of my friendship with Leon. A rebel he might have been, with his long hair and his shoplifting forays, but in spite of all that, Leon remained very much a product of his background, speaking with contempt of what he called “the proles” and “the mundanes,” mocking my Sunnybank Park contemporaries with vicious and relentless accuracy.
For my own part, I joined in the mockery without reserve. I had always loathed Sunnybank Park; I felt no loyalty to the pupils there and embraced the cause of St. Oswald’s without hesitation. That was where I belonged, and I made certain that everything about me—hair, voice, manners—reflected that allegiance. At that time I wished more than ever for my fiction to be true, longed for the police-inspector father of my imagination and hated more than words could say the fat, sullen caretaker with his foul mouth and thick, beery gut. With me he had grown increasingly irritable; the failure of the karate lessons had compounded his disappointment, and on several occasions I found him watching me with frank and open dislike.
Still, once or twice, he made a feeble, halfhearted effort. Asked me to a football match; gave me money for the pictures. Most of the time, however, he did not. I watched him sink deeper every day into his routine of television, beer, takeaways, and fumbling, noisy (and increasingly unsuccessful) sex. After a while even that stopped, and Pepsi’s visits grew less and less frequent. I saw her in town a couple of times, and once in the park with a young man. He was wearing a leather jacket and had one of his hands up Pepsi’s pink angora sweater. After that she hardly came to see us at all.
It was ironic that the one thing that saved my father during those weeks was the thing he was growing to hate. St. Oswald’s had been his life, his hope, his pride; now it seemed to taunt him with his own inadequacy. Even so, he endured it; performed his duties faithfully, if without love; squared his stubborn back to the boys who taunted him and sang rude little chants about him in the playground. For me, he endured it; for me, he held out almost to the last. I know that, now that it’s too late; but at twelve so many things are hidden; so many things still to be discovered.
“Hey, Pinchbeck!” We were sitting in the Quad under the beech trees. The sun was hot, and John Snyde was mowing the lawn. I remember that smell, the smell of school days; of mown grass, dust, and of things growing too fast and out of control. “Looks like Big John’s having a spot of bother.”
I looked. So he was; at the limit of the cricket lawn the Mean Machine had broken down again, and my father was trying to restart it, swearing and sweating as he pulled at the sagging waistband of his jeans. The little boys had already begun to close in; a cordon of them, like Pygmies around a wounded rhino.
John! Hey, John! I could hear them across the cricket lawn, budgie voices in the hazy heat. Darting in, darting out, daring one another to get a little closer every time.
“Geddout of it!” He waved his arms at them like a man scaring crows. His beery shout reached us a second later; high-pitched laughter followed. Squealing, they scattered; seconds later they were already creeping back, giggling like girls.
Leon grinned. “Come on,” he said. “We’ll have a laugh.”
I followed him reluctantly, keeping back, removing the glasses that might have marked me. I needn’t have bothered; my father was drunk. Drunk and furious, goaded by the heat and the juniors who wouldn’t leave him alone.
“Excuse me, Mr. Snyde, sir,” said Leon, behind him.
He turned, gaping—taken by surprise by that “sir.”
Leon faced him, polite and smiling. “Dr. Tidy would like to see you in the Bursar’s office,” he said. “He says it’s important.”
My father hated the Bursar—a clever man with a satiric tongue, who ran the school’s finances from a spotless little office near the Porter’s Lodge. It would have been hard to miss the hostility between them. Tidy was neat, obsessive, meticulous. He attended Chapel every morning; drank chamomile tea to soothe his nerves; bred prize-winning orchids in the school conservatory. Everything about John Snyde seemed calculated to upset him: his slouch; his boorishness; the way his trousers came down well over the waistband of his yellowing underpants.
“Dr. Tidy?” said my father, eyes narrowed.
“Yes, sir,” said Leon.
“Shit.” He slouched off, bearish, toward the office.
Leon grinned at me. “I wonder what Tidy’ll say when he smells that breath?” he said, running his fingers over the Mean Machine’s battered flank. Then he turned, his eyes bright with malice. “Hey, Pinchbeck. Want a ride?”
I shook my head, appalled—but excited too.
“Come on, Pinchbeck. It’s too good an opportunity to miss.” And with one light step he was on the machine, pressing the starter button, revving her up—
“Last chance, Pinchbeck.”
I could not refuse the challenge. I jumped up onto the wheel rim, balancing as the Mean Machine lurched into motion. The juniors scattered, squealing. Leon was laughing wildly; grass sprayed out from behind the wheels in a triumphant green spume; and across the lawn John Snyde came running, too slow for it to matter but furious, feather-spitting crazy with rage.
“You boys, there! You fucking boys!”
Leon looked at me. We were n
earing the far end of the lawn now; the Mean Machine was making the most terrible noise; behind us we could see John Snyde, helplessly outdistanced, and behind him, Dr. Tidy, his face a blur of outrage.
For a second joy transfixed me. We were magical; we were Butch and Sundance, leaping from the cliff’s edge, leaping from the mower in a haze of grass and glory and running for it, running like hell as the Mean Machine kept going in majestic, unstoppable slo-mo toward the trees.
We were never caught. The juniors never identified us, and the Bursar was so irate at my father’s behavior—at his foul language on school premises, even more than at his drunkenness or his dereliction of duty—that he omitted to follow up whatever leads he might have had. Mr. Roach, who had been (officially) on duty, was given a ticking-off by the Head, and my father received an official warning and a bill for repairs.
None of this had any effect on me, however. Another line had been crossed, and I was elated. Even sticking it to that bastard Bray had never felt as good as this, and for days I walked on a rosy cloud, through which nothing but Leon could be seen, felt, or heard.
I was in love.
At the time I dared not think so in as many words. Leon was my friend. That was all he ever could be. And yet that’s what it was: blazing, purblind, triple-infatuated, sleepless, self-sacrificing love. Everything in my life was filtered through its hopeful lens; he was my first thought in the morning; my last at night. I was not quite besotted enough to believe that my feelings were in any way reciprocated; to him, I was just a first-year; amusing enough, but by far his inferior. Somedays he would spend his lunch break with me; at other times he might keep me waiting for the entire hour, completely unaware of the risks I ran daily for the chance of being with him.
Nevertheless, I was happy. I did not need Leon’s constant presence for my happiness to flourish; for the time it was enough simply to know he was close by. I had to be clever, I told myself; I had to be patient. Above all I sensed that I must not become tiresome, and hid my feelings behind a barrier of facetiousness whilst evolving ever more ingenious ways to worship him in secret.
I exchanged school sweaters with him, and for a week I wore his around my neck. In the evenings I opened his locker with my father’s master key and went through Leon’s things, reading his class notes, his books, looking at the cartoon doodles he drew when he was bored, practicing his signature. Outside of my role as a St. Oswald’s pupil I watched him from afar, sometimes passing by his house in the hope of catching a glimpse of him—or even his sister, whom I worshipped by association. I memorized the number plate on his mother’s car. I fed his dog in secret. I combed my lank brown hair so that I fancied it looked like his, cultivated his expressions and his tastes. I had known him for just over six weeks.
I anticipated the approaching summer holidays at the same time as a relief and a further source of anxiety. Relief, because the effort of attending two schools—albeit erratically—was beginning to take its toll. Miss McAuleigh had complained about missing homework and frequent absences, and although I had become skilled at forging my father’s signature, there was always the danger that someone might meet him by chance and blow my cover. Anxiety, because although I would soon be free to meet Leon as often as I wished, it meant running even more risks, as I continued my imposture as a civilian.
Fortunately, I had already completed the spadework within the school itself. The rest was a question of timing, location, and a few well-chosen props, mainly costumes, which would establish me as the well-off, middle-class individual I pretended to be.
I stole a pair of expensive trainers from a sports shop in town, and a new racing bike (my own would have been quite impossible) from outside a nice house a comfortable distance away. I repainted it, just to be sure, and sold my own on the Saturday market. If my father noticed, I would have told him I had traded in my old bike for a secondhand model because it was getting too small for me. It was a good story, and would probably have worked, but by then, with the end of term, my father was at last beginning to unravel, and he never noticed anything anymore.
Fallow has his place now. Fat Fallow, with his loose lips and ancient donkey jacket. He has my father’s slouch too, from years of driving the ride-on mower, and like my father’s, his gut spills out obscenely from over his narrow, shiny belt. There is a tradition that all school porters are called John, and this is true of Fallow too, though the boys do not call after him and bait him as they did my father. I’m glad; I might have to intervene if they did, and I do not want to make myself conspicuous at this stage.
But Fallow offends me. He has hairy ears and reads the News of the World in his little lodge, wearing ancient slippers on his bare feet, drinking milky tea and ignoring what happens around him. Half-wit Jimmy does the real work; the building, the woodwork, the wiring, the drains. Fallow takes the phone calls. He enjoys making the callers wait—anxious mothers asking after their sick sons, rich fathers detained at a last-minute meeting with the directors—sometimes for minutes on end as he finishes his tea and scrawls the message on a piece of yellow paper. He likes to travel, and sometimes goes on day trips to France, organized by his local workingmen’s club, during which he goes to the supermarket, eats chips by the side of the tour bus, and complains about the locals.
At work he is by turns rude and deferential, depending on the status of his visitor; he charges boys a pound for opening their locker with the master key; he gloats at the legs of female teachers as they walk up the stairs. With lesser staff he is pompous and opinionated; says “Know what I mean?” and “I’ll tell you this for nothing, mate.”
With the higher echelons he is obsequious; with veterans, nauseatingly pally; with juniors like myself, brusque and busy, with no time to waste on chat. He goes up to the Computer Room on Fridays after school, ostensibly to turn off the machines, but actually surfing Internet porn sites after hours, while outside in the corridor, Jimmy uses the floor polisher, passing it slowly across the boards, bringing the old wood to a mellow shine.
It takes less than a minute to obliterate an hour’s work. By eight-thirty on Monday morning the floors will be as dusty and scuffed as if Jimmy had never been there at all. Fallow knows this; and though he does not perform these cleaning duties himself, he nevertheless feels an obscure resentment, as if staff and boys were an impediment to the smooth running of things.
As a result, his life consists of small and spiteful revenges. No one really observes him—a Porter lives below the salt and so may take such liberties with the system that remain unnoticed. Members of staff are mostly unaware of this, but I have been watching. From my position in the Bell Tower I can see his little lodge; I can observe the comings and goings without being seen.
There is an ice cream van parked outside the school gates. My father would never have allowed that, but Fallow tolerates it, and there is often a queue of boys there after school or at lunchtime. Some buy ice cream there; others return with bulging pockets and the furtive grin of one who has balked the system. Officially, junior boys are not supposed to leave the school grounds, but the van is only a few yards away, and Pat Bishop accepts it as long as no one crosses the busy road. Besides, he likes ice cream, and I’ve seen him several times, munching on a cone as he supervises the boys in the yard.
Fallow, too, visits the ice cream van. He does it in the morning, when lessons have already begun, making sure to circle the buildings clockwise and thereby avoid passing under the Common Room window. Sometimes he has a plastic bag with him—it is not heavy, but quite bulky—which he leaves under the counter. Sometimes he returns with a cone, sometimes not.
In fifteen years, many of the school’s passkeys have been changed. It was to have been expected—St. Oswald’s has always been a target, and security must be maintained—but the Porter’s Lodge, among others, is one of the exceptions. After all, why would anyone want to break into the Porter’s Lodge? There’s nothing there except an old armchair, a gas heater, a kettle, a phone, and a few girlie
magazines hidden under the counter. There’s another hiding place too, a rather more sophisticated one, behind the hollow panel that masks the ventilation system, though this is a secret passed on jealously from one Porter to another. It is not very large but will easily take a couple of six-packs, as my father discovered, and as he told me then, the bosses don’t always have to know everything.
I was feeling good today as I drove home. Summer is almost at an end, and there is a yellowness and a grainy texture to the light that reminds me of the television shows of my adolescence. The nights are getting cold; in my rented flat, six miles from the city center, I will soon have to light the gas fire. The flat is not an especially attractive place—one room, a kitchen annex, and a tiny bathroom—but it’s the cheapest I could find, and, of course, I do not mean to stay for long.
It is virtually unfurnished. I have a sofa bed; a desk; a light; a computer and modem. I shall probably leave them all behind when I go. The computer is clean—or will be, when I have wiped the incriminating stuff from its hard drive. The car is rented and will also have been thoroughly cleaned by the rental firm by the time the police trace it back to me.
My elderly landlady is a gossip. She wonders why a nice, clean, professional person such as myself should choose to stay in a low-rent flatblock filled with druggies and ex-convicts and people on the dole. I’ve told her that I am a sales coordinator for a large international software company; that my firm has agreed to provide me with a house, but that the contractors have let them down. She shakes her head at this, bemoaning the ineptitude of builders everywhere, and hopes I’ll be in my new home by Christmas.
“Because it must be miserable, mustn’t it, love, not having your own place? And especially at Christmas—” Her weak eyes mist over sentimentally. I consider telling her that most deaths among old people occur during the winter months; that three-quarters of would-be suicides will take the plunge during the festive season. But I must maintain the pretense for the moment; so I answer her questions as best I can; I listen to her reminiscences; I am beyond reproach. In gratitude, my landlady has decorated my little room with chintz curtains and a vase of dusty paper flowers. “Think of it as your little home away from home,” she tells me. “And if you need anything, I’m always here.”