I showed them this time. I showed them both. No one cuts me up; no one plays me for a loser. I walked back to the car, got in, turned up the radio (Pink Floyd, ‘Another Brick in the Wall, Part II’), adjusted my dashboard mascot (Bart Simpson), pulled on my gloves and revved off into the sunrise, while behind me lights flashed and sirens wailed and that phantom smell of piss, of loser, kept getting stronger and stronger, even as I drove away.
The Spectator
Not long ago, at the height of the media paedophile frenzy, a pensioner friend was attacked by a neighbour. The reason? Because he liked to take his daily walk past the school playing fields and watch the children playing football. This harmless old man was so frightened by the attack, which was vicious and unprovoked, that he now hardly ever leaves his house at all. I find this more depressing than words can say. All over the country, it seems that children are being taught to see all strangers as potential aggressors; and more and more adults are learning to give children a wide berth in the fear that they may fall under suspicion. This story owes much to Ray Bradbury’s haunting tale, ‘The Pedestrian’.
EVERY WEEKDAY MORNING at ten-thirty, Mr Leonard Meadowes would put on his overcoat, his red scarf and his ancient trilby and set out on his daily constitutional. Past the corner shop, where he would buy a copy of The Times – and occasionally a quarter of Murray Mints or Yorkshire Mixture – past the deserted churchyard with its lopsided gravestones and thick wreaths of hemlock and trailing convolvulus, past the charity shop where he bought most of his clothes, across a main road blaring with traffic, through the small wood where he used to walk his dog, and into the lane which bordered onto the school playing fields. He wore trainers for the walk, as much for comfort as for discretion, and if the weather was fine, he would sit on the wall for twenty minutes or so and observe the children at play before turning back through the wood in the direction of Dare’s café and his usual buttered toast and pot of tea.
Today, in late October, the sun was shining, and there was a smoky sweetness in the air like falling leaves. One of those perfect days of which the English autumn has so few, sun-warmed like an apricot, tangled with blackberries, crunchy as cornflakes underfoot. Here by the playing fields it was quiet; a dry-stone wall at the edge of the trees marked the boundary, and beyond it the grass was still summer-sweet and freckled with daisies, rolling gently down a soft incline towards a square brick building shining mellow in the sunlight.
Ten-fifty-five. In five minutes, he told himself, it would be break-time, and children would shoot from the school’s four doorways like fireworks – red, blue, neon-green – hair flying, socks at half-mast, voices raised and soaring like kites into the soft golden air. Twenty minutes of break-time: of freedom from rules and constructions; of fights and bloody noses, treasures lost and bartered, outlaws and heroes and whispered rebellions and shrieking, dappled, grubby-kneed bliss.
Once, Mr Meadowes had himself been a teacher. Thirty years in the classroom, in the smell of chalk and cabbage and mown grass and socks and wood-polish and life. Of course, in this year of 2023 there were no more teachers – after all, computers were far safer and more efficient – but the school still looked so familiar, so real in the sweet October light that he could almost ignore the chain-link fence that reared mightily above the little wall and ran all the way around the playing field, the lightning-bolt electrification symbol and the lettered warning – SCHOOL – NO UNACCOMPANIED ADULTS – bolted to the post.
But Mr Meadowes was remembering his own classrooms; the scarred wooden floors stained purple with ink and polished to a lethal gloss by generations of young feet; the passageways soft with blackboard dust; the flying staircases of books; the graffitied desks with their furtive slogans; the crumpled worksheets, confiscated cigarettes, copied homework, arcane messages, and other forgotten artefacts of that lost and long-ago state of grace.
Of course, it wasn’t really like that: nowadays each pupil had a workstation with a plastic desktop, a voice-activated monitor, an electronic pen and a computer-generated tutor with an ageless and intelligent face (a prototype selected from thousands of designs by the Centre for Generational Awareness to inspire confidence and respect). All lessons were taken from the workstation – even practicals were performed under virtual conditions. In the barbaric old days, children had been scalded by steam during poorly supervised cookery lessons, acid-burned in chemistry, had their bones broken in various sports, skinned their knees in asphalt playgrounds and were bullied and victimized in countless ways by their human teachers. Nowadays, all children were safe. So safe, in fact, that sightings had become quite uncommon. And yet they still looked much the same as he remembered, thought Mr Meadowes. They sounded the same. What, then, had changed?
Mr Meadowes was so deep in his thoughts that he did not notice the sound of a security van approaching along the lane, or hear the recorded alarm-signal – Children! Danger! Children! – as it clattered towards him. It was only when the vehicle stopped right in front of him, its turret light strobing, that he saw it and was startled from his thoughts.
‘Don’t move! Stop right there!’ said a metallic voice from inside the van.
Mr Meadowes took his hands out of his pockets so fast that his bag of sweets spilled out, scattering across the lane like coloured marbles. Beyond the chain-link fence, the children were coming quietly out of the school buildings in twos and threes, some huddled over electronic gamesets, some glancing curiously at the security vehicle with its illuminated turret and the old, old man in the battered trilby with his hands raised and his palms outstretched like an actor in one of those old films, where everyone was in black and white, and men on horseback held up stagecoaches and Martians stalked the barren lands with Death Rays at the ready.
‘Your name?’ demanded the vehicle stridently.
Mr Meadowes told it, keeping his hands clearly visible at all times.
‘Business or profession?’
‘I’m – a teacher,’ admitted Mr Meadowes.
There was a whirring sound from inside the vehicle. ‘No business or profession,’ said the metallic voice. ‘Marital status?’
‘Er – I’m not married,’ said Mr Meadowes. ‘I did have a dog, but—’
‘Unmarried,’ intoned the vehicle. Though the robot voice was completely uninflected, Mr Meadowes seemed to hear a kind of disapproval in the word. ‘Can you explain to me, Mr Meadowes, your purpose in loitering outside a clearly marked restricted area?’
‘I was just walking,’ he said.
‘Walking.’
‘I like to walk,’ explained Mr Meadowes. ‘I like to watch the children playing.’
‘And have you ever done this before?’ said the machine. ‘This walking and watching?’
‘Every day,’ he replied, ‘for fifteen years.’
There was a long, hissing silence. ‘And are you aware, Mr Meadowes, that personal contact (including physical, audio-visual, virtual or electronic) between an unsupervised adult and a child or young person (that being defined as any person under the age of sixteen) is strictly prohibited under the terms of Clause 9 of the Generations Act of 2008?’
‘I like to hear their voices,’ said Mr Meadowes. ‘It makes me feel young.’
The silence from the machine was somehow even more damning than its toneless voice. Mr Meadowes remembered a rumour (from the old days, before the things had become so familiar that no one even noticed them any more) that the security vans were controlled remotely from a central computer, without the input of a single human operative. ‘Surely there can’t be any harm in that,’ he said helplessly. ‘I mean – don’t we all enjoy watching children at play?’
There came a new sound from inside the vehicle and a door opened, revealing a metal-panelled interior. ‘Get in, please,’ ordered the robotic voice.
‘But I haven’t done anything wrong,’ protested Mr Meadowes.
‘Get in, please,’ repeated the voice.
Mr Meadowes hesitated for a mome
nt, then entered the van. It was a small, dark metal box with a tiny window of reinforced glass, a bench in the middle and a grille set into the back panel to protect the operating system. ‘Now if you had a child of your own—’ said the voice, and Mr Meadowes realized that, after all, there was a man in the driver’s seat on the other side of the grille; a man with a microphone and an electronic clipboard who looked at him with disgust and a furtive kind of pity before turning back to the controls.
The door closed softly. The vehicle set off again along the lane, and the light that filtered through the grille was freckled and golden. The man in the driver’s seat did not turn round again, even when Mr Meadowes addressed him.
‘Where are we going?’ asked Mr Meadowes at last.
‘To the Centre for Research on Generational and Psycho-sexual Maladjustment.’
They passed down the lane and through the little wood; across the main road where his dog had been run over, eighteen months before; past the streets of identical terraced houses – his own among them – and the arcades of identical trees. They drove right out of the city, along a broad, sweeping expressway lined with multicoloured billboards behind which, every now and then, Mr Meadowes glimpsed the familiar and all-engulfing concrete rubble of the wastelands.
A few minutes later, they passed a row of derelict buildings. A church – closed now for safety reasons, like all others; an old flat-screen cinema; a couple of bookshops; the remains of a park with swings and a bandstand; and at the end of the row, a large and still-lovely building of soot-mellowed stone, bearing the faded sign: St Oswald’s Grammar School for Boys: 1890–2008.
‘That’s my school,’ said Mr Meadowes as they passed.
In silence, the van rushed on.
Al and Christine’s World of Leather
I wrote this out of pure mischief. Because although romance may be dead, the beat goes on . . .
CHRISTINE REACHED FOR her cup of tea, stretched her cramped spine and sat back to examine her handiwork. Quite a good job, though she said it herself: nice straight seams, no puckering in spite of the difficult fabric, a good strong line. That was going to make someone a very nice, durable pair of work trousers: unusual, perhaps, but hardwearing. Vaguely she wondered what the flap was for.
Not that it mattered. Nowadays she just did what she was told, and let Candy deal with the artistic side of things. Doing what she was told, after all, was what Christine Jones was best at. Imagination was Candy’s department.
They had met at a WeightWatchers meeting. Candy was ten stone three and wanted to get down to nine and a half; Christine was thirteen-ten and, as her husband Jack put it, letting herself go. She was planning to let go of at least three stone, anyway, but somehow had never quite made it; instead she’d gained six pounds and a social life of sorts, consisting of Candy, her friend Babs, and the WeightWatchers’ mascot, Big Al Maguire.
Big Al had been going to the club for over three years. A huge man who never seemed to lose any weight, he was tolerated only because he made even the fattest women feel better about themselves. Christine wondered what he got out of it, and decided that he just liked the company. Babs worked in a shoe factory and was desperate for a man; Candy was a divorcee, now a mature student at the local Poly, studying textiles and design.
She had taken to Christine at once. ‘What a lovely sweater,’ she had said, as Christine stepped down from the weighing machine. ‘Missoni, is it?’
Christine flushed, and admitted she’d made it herself.
Candy was impressed. She couldn’t sew or knit herself, she said, but she had lots of ideas; perhaps they could get together some time and talk. And so the ‘knitting coven’, as Jack called it, was created. Every Sunday after church, Candy, Babs, Christine and Big Al would meet at Christine’s house and discuss yarns and designs. They were all enthusiastic, but Christine was by far the most technically expert, and for the first time, she found that others looked to her for advice. Candy couldn’t knit; Babs was quick, but careless, and Big Al, though his giant fingers were astonishingly delicate with the yarn and needles, was too slow for anything but the simplest work.
But Candy had big ideas for the knitting coven. She had a friend, a fellow student from her course, who had opened a little shop. Handmade knitwear could be a real earner, with quite a simple pattern selling at sixty pounds or more. Deducting twenty per cent for the friend, another twenty for cost of yarn and other overheads, that still left half to be divided equally between the designer (Candy, of course) and the workforce – or, in this case, as it happened, Christine.
At first, Jack had resented it, making fun of her friends and her little sideline. But then the money had started to come in – only a few pounds at first, but then more, as the patterns grew more ambitious and the yarns more unusual. Now Candy experimented with combination yarns, with lurex and rubber and silk fibres twisted into the wool. They were harder to knit with, beyond the skills of Babs or Big Al, but sometimes the results were dramatic, and a finished garment might sell for eighty, even a hundred pounds.
Gradually, Christine’s role in the knitting coven expanded still further. She no longer used the basic patterns, leaving the simple designs to Babs, and the deliveries – increasingly frequent now – to Big Al. Instead she worked with the special yarns, and, as the money continued to come in, began to take in commissions on non-knitwear items. Occasional pieces of modern dancewear; performance gear; fancy dress. Some of it was quite unusual – the trousers with the mysterious flap, for instance – but Candy assured her that this was where the real money was, and after a single payment of over two hundred pounds – a leather gladiator skirt with studded harness, for a theatre performance of Julius Caesar – Christine found herself having to agree. After that, Candy suggested they went into business together, with the friend as a sleeping partner, each owning a third share. A lawyer drew up the papers. Christine protested that she didn’t need a partnership – after all, Babs and Big Al were paid by the hour – but Candy wanted everything to be scrupulously fair.
‘It’s only right, darling,’ she said, when Christine had mentioned her doubts. ‘After all, you do so much of the work.’ This touched Christine, who knew herself to be so much less intelligent or attractive than her friend, and who often felt embarrassed at her own inadequacy. Candy deserved better, she thought; it was proof of her sweet nature that she never mentioned it.
It was at this point that Jack stopped complaining. Christine had a hobby room of her own now, in which she kept the leather-adapted industrial sewing machine for her special work, and she spent most evenings in there, listening to the radio as she worked, while Jack spent increasing amounts of time at the health club; for unlike Christine, Jack had not let himself go, and had retained an impressive level of fitness.
This sometimes troubled Christine. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust her husband, she told herself; but three hours at the health club every night did seem a little excessive. She wondered if he was having an affair, then felt guilty for even considering it. Jack was very much a man’s man – his reaction to the knitting coven showed it – and he needed male company from time to time. She was lucky, she told herself; he was cheerful, devoted, and made no unreasonable sexual demands (though he might try once in a while, she thought; there was such a thing as being too chivalrous). No, she was lucky to have him, she repeated to herself; perhaps he deserved better.
Still, thought Christine, sometimes it was quite a relief to know that Jack was safely out of the house when she worked on her special commissions. He had never made any secret of his dislike of Candy, and his contempt for Big Al, too, was thinly veiled. Besides, he had a limited knowledge of specialist leatherwork – you don’t get much exposure to that kind of thing in retail management – and she knew that if he caught sight of her current order list, he would certainly make one of his sarcastic comments. True, it was a peculiar collection, but someone was paying over three hundred pounds for the lot, so there had to be a market for it s
omewhere.
Once more, she considered the trousers. Good-quality leather; black; thirty-two waist; decorative insert. The purpose of the back flap still eluded her – perhaps some kind of a tool pocket, she thought, though honestly, you’d think they’d want a bit more protection if they’re going to be working with equipment. She hoped she hadn’t got it wrong; but it wasn’t the first pair she had made, and the customers had never complained. Besides, she had given up on trying to improve patterns since she had inadvertently ruined a whole underwear commission (a conceptual dance company, Candy had said) by introducing a reinforced gusset to the basic design. Candy had been rather nasty about it, she remembered, saying, For God’s sake, Christine, if we’d wanted gussets we’d have bloody well asked for them, so now she did only what she was told. Perhaps dancers need more ventilation – you know, down there – she thought. In that case, a reinforced gusset might cause all kinds of unexpected problems. No wonder Candy had been annoyed.
All the same, she thought, a most unusual pair of trousers. The black tutu was normal enough, she supposed, and the corset seemed designed to go with it somehow, though she couldn’t work out how. It was stiffly boned (she’d used heavy-duty nylon slats) and laced up at the back, something like the one her grandmother used to wear, though obviously her grandmother’s wasn’t made of leather. Perhaps for someone with a slipped disc, thought Christine, though you’d expect them to do that kind of thing on the National Health. And what was this thing? Not a hat, precisely; in fact from this angle it looked more like a kind of mask, although how were you supposed to see anything if there weren’t any eye-holes? Christine shook her head disapprovingly. These dance people could come up with some very strange ideas nowadays. What was wrong with a nice Swan Lake? Or a Nutcracker?