We found our way into the burned-out house towards the end of the summer term. A miracle its gravity hadn’t drawn anyone else. At one edge St Thomas’s playing field was bordered by a two-foot-high bank and a line of railings with a thicket of trees beyond. Between the back of the bank and the railings was a narrow gully you could crawl along unseen. If you followed it far enough it brought you to where the railings ended and, at right-angles to it, the hedges of the houses that backed on to the field began. The burned-out house was the first in the row of four. A hole barely big enough to squeeze through, but when you did, there you were in the darkly enclosed space, fenced on either side, with the great mystery of the fire-eaten house in front of you.
In the kitchen I kissed Scarlet and put my hands on her hips. These warmer days we’d made this our place. The feel of her was the same bloodwarm miracle every time as if for the first time. The hard of the hip was so you understood the soft of the waist; ditto knee and thigh, rib and belly, jaw and throat: hard–soft. School dessert had been chocolate sponge and chocolate custard. Our mouths were sour from it, milk powder in the custard that outlasted the cocoa, lingered on the tongue. She stuck hers out for me to suck, hummed a tune while I did it. The pleasure of holding her and sucking her tongue was so intense that every moment I thought something must happen to stop it.
She disengaged, stepped back, leaving me open-mouthed leaning out into nothing. Light from where a window-board had slipped came in and gave one half of her hair a nimbus. The St Thomas’s girls’ uniform was a pale-blue cotton dress, white knee-socks and an olive-green jumper or cardie. Scarlet had the cardie, two buttons missing.
‘Let’s do the you know,’ I said. I didn’t like the way she’d been recently, the suggestion of boredom or irritation. Her attention was moving past me. She’d noticed the bright edge of Elsewhere, I thought, exactly as Melissa had in the months before she’d left, as Maude was beginning to, of late. A female tropism, I decided. Moments like just now, her stepping back, suddenly reclaiming her tongue, gave me a glimpse of how desolate the world would be without her. The alienness of brick walls and cars and other people’s faces and twirling umbrellas and teachers would surge back into awful unmediated existence, demanding I made something of them; impossible without her.
‘Scarlet?’
She put her hands on her hips and her head on one side, as if I were a perplexing but only mildly interesting painting.
‘Come on. Take your knickers off.’
She stared, slowly righted her head. She did this not-speaking-to-me routine from time to time, or carried on as if I wasn’t there at all. It brought all the violence I could do to her (if not for the great wall of love and worship in the way) to the surface.
‘Upstairs,’ she said.
The staircase of the burned-out house was intact but what was left of the upper floor was precarious. The fire had eaten from the front of the building towards the back at a tilt. One bedroom had no floor, another’s was undamaged, but the one Scarlet preferred had half its floor missing, the remains a jagged crescent. You had to edge round the drop, looking down past the blackened stumps of the joists into the scorched living room below. From its glassless window (two or three planks cursorily nailed up) you got a view of playing field and playground, saw the whole St Thomas’s population in its constituent clusters: girls skipping; loners mooching; boys chasing soccer balls. It was small and sad seen in its entirety, bits of life you knew felt huge and urgent if you were down there in them. Perhaps it was how God saw the world.
‘And I don’t know why you’re calling me Scarlet,’ she said, as we went up, vertiginous me clinging to the wall. ‘My name’s Sabrina.’
Another thing she’d started lately. Sabrina, Megan, Chrissie, Natalie. It gave me a dirty feeling using these aliases, but she wouldn’t answer me if I didn’t. She’d let me get used to calling her by one false name then switch to another. It made me think of Dinah. They came with me, you know.
‘Can I kiss you there?’
I knelt and she lifted her dress, the cool cotton tent over the soft warm middle of her. I was aware of the floor’s edge at my back, the drop like a cold open mouth. The house smelled of wet dust and charcoal. Scarlet’s green-cardied shoulder blazed when she leaned into one of the window’s slats of light. It used to be that she fiddled with me, too, stretched, twanged, squeezed and put in her hot soft wet still mouth my twitching prick, but recent weeks had reduced us. For me these games never stopped promising something–but what, I didn’t know–beyond themselves. For her it was as if they’d failed to deliver.
At the burned edge of the drop I stood releasing at Scarlet’s instruction an arc of piss into the room below. Sunlight passed cheerily through the hot stream.
‘There,’ she said, pointing to a patch of exposed brick. I shifted aim. Hit. She laughed.
‘There, where that writing is.’
Another hip-swing. Another hit. The graffiti of evening vandals.
‘I’m running out,’ I said. ‘Hurry up and—’
‘Shshsh! What’s that?’
My piss stopped. ‘What?’
‘Shshsh!’
Voices in the garden. I tucked away and zipped up, pronto. Scarlet with black eyes wide put her index finger over her lips. Quiet. Together on tiptoe we returned to the window and peeped between the boards.
Gary and Wally. Gary Dempster, ‘Cockertskoo’ (tr. ‘Cock of the School’, i.e., the boy no one could beat in a fight) and Robbie Walsh, a.k.a. Wally, Little Wol, Rolly, and, by recent poetic fiat of Gary Dempster, Wally Da-Da. Wally was unnaturally small with a pudding bowl haircut that made his head look like a mushroom. He was catarrhal and red-faced with rheumy blue eyes and prematurely detonated capilliaries in his cheeks. (Walsh, Mrs Shepherd had once famously said, you’re like an offensive alcoholic dwarf. Do something about yourself, can’t you?) Gary Dempster, Cockertskoo, skinny, big-boned, with a mop of dark hair, sad grey eyes and a full-lipped feminine mouth, won all his fights because he had rage. If there was a brick he’d grab it and smash your head with it. He’d come to St Thomas’s two years ago from Burnside Children’s Home. We got these terrifying children now and then who smelled of stale piss and wrote like Infants and if pushed screamed obscenities at the teachers. Gary had been suspended, let back in, suspended, let back in. In Miss Livsey’s class he’d thrown a chair through a window, and he’d called Mr Entwistle a bald cunt to his face. He’d had what looked like an epileptic fit in the corridor, which had brought teachers running, with versions of their faces we’d never seen before; they were people, we discovered, with an access of horror. This was Gary’s last year and the word ‘borstal’ kept being said to him. Once, I’d come out of a toilet cubicle and found him standing alone in silence staring at the tiled floor, hands uncharacteristically out of his pockets. My scalp shrank as I walked past him–the swipe, the lash out–but he didn’t even look at me, just carried on staring at the floor.
Certain things disgusted him. Wally was one of them. Therefore he went through phases of forcing his company on Wally, making him go around with him, getting him into trouble. Over the last week or two he had made Wally his ‘leader’, the Great Wally Da-Da, whose job it was to pick boys for Gary to beat up. Wally, in visible misery, had no choice but to play along.
‘I don’t reck we’re sposed be in here,’ Wally said. Gary, inspecting the gap in the boarded-up door directly below us, ignored him. ‘Oi, Gary, don’t you reck we shouldn’t be in here?’
‘Shut it,’ Gary said. ‘Get over here.’
Wally stood in the middle of the overgrown back lawn with his mouth open and his arms held slightly away from his body. ‘Let’s go back,’ he said. ‘We can go back and—’
Gary turned, walked over to Wally, quickly.
‘Don’t Gary don’t please, please—’ Wally cringed, arms crossed and wrapped tight round his face. Gary calmly grabbed a fistful of Wally’s hair and yanked. Wally screeched and dropped to his knees.
/> ‘Fuckin shuddup,’ Gary said.
We heard them coming in, got down on our bellies. They were in the kitchen, Gary poking around. It was depressing seeing the two of them together, Gary moving about, occasionally turning and making strange faces at Wally, Wally exaggeratedly snorting and snickering. Gary kept up a quiet soliloquy, or series of soliloquies, since he changed voices repeatedly. Scarlet and I lay on our bellies at the edge of the drop.
‘Hygiene inspection,’ Gary said. This was him impersonating a grown-up. ‘By your bed, now, laddie.’
‘Gary, don’t.’
‘Come on, now, laddie-boy, no nonsense else I’ll ’aff teck measures.’
‘Gary, I don’t wan’t.’
‘Right. I’m teckin…’
They came into view below us. My shoulders tightened. Wally was crying, silently, with his face screwed up. Gary was behind him, not looking at him. A weight came up off them and pressed on my head. There were those minutes before a thunderstorm, the space between you and the sky filling with invisible tons.
‘Stop fuckin…’ Gary said. Then, as if to an invisible colleague, in a nasal, W. C. Fieldsish voice: ‘The boy’s a grizzler. The boy’s a grizzler.’ Wally’s hands covered his face. Scarlet’s body pressed against mine. I wanted to move back but any sound might draw their attention. Hygiene inspection was when Nitty Nora the Bug Explorer, a mountainous blue-eyeshadowed nurse with an odour of flour and antiseptic, pulled you close and rummaged your scalp for nits. A surprisingly delicious experience, your vestigial ape reduced to boneless ecstasy. You went away half devoted to the woman.
I daren’t turn my head to look at Scarlet in case it made a noise. All either Gary or Wally had to do was look up. Gary had gone over to a corner and taken a piece of folded-up newspaper out of his pocket. He looked at it for a few moments, breathing heavily through his nose. It was the same emptied look I’d seen that day in the toilets, as if he was staring into nothingness with nothing inside him. He folded the piece of newspaper back up and put it carefully into his pocket. ‘Hygiene inspection,’ he repeated, not looking at Wally, wrinkling his nose as at the detection of a bad smell. ‘By your bed, laddie. Let’s be ’avin you, now, chop-chop.’
He approached Wally. Wally’s head shuddered; he was jamming his jaws together. Gary observed this for a moment, then grabbed Wally by the hair and pulled his face close to his own. They remained in this Eskimo greeting for a few seconds, Wally with head shuddering, Gary with nose wrinkled and eyebrows raised. There was a curious little shuffle, both of them moving together, then I saw that Gary was trying to pull Wally’s pants down. Wally, with pained face, making a pointless fight of it, grabbed Gary’s wrists. Gary giggled, flicked Wally’s hands away, slapped him, lightly, across the face, then with brisk disgust in three awkward yanks forced Wally’s shorts and underpants down.
‘Ands on yer ed!’ Gary barked. ‘And stop that snivellin, now, laddie boy, if you don’t mind.’
Wally, trembling, raised his hands and put them on his head. The gesture lifted his sweater and shirttail higher, revealed the elastic-marked waist and pale pelvis. Gary stood with his fists on his hips for a few moments. Turned and took a few steps away. Then turned back. He took the piece of newspaper and a pencil from his pocket, unfolded the newspaper, hurried round to face Wally, held it out to him. ‘Hold that, laddie,’ he said. Wally was quiet, shivering, but I had the sense he’d gone into himself. ‘Hold it, I said,’ Gary said. ‘Never seen one of them before have you, laddie, eh?’ Wally with shaking hands took the newspaper clipping. We couldn’t see what was on it. Gary seemed to be fighting persistent boredom. He circled Wally, but veered away, went to the window or kicked about in the rubble. Eventually with a sigh he approached Wally and began poking his buttocks with the rubber end of the pencil. Every time he did, Wally, hobbled by his dropped trousers, flinched and shuffled forward. ‘Move again, laddie, would you?’ Gary said, poking repeatedly. Wally was in a very thin voice mumbling to himself. Eventually he was up against the wall. Gary leaned back and with a dentist’s weary concentration carefully aimed and pushed the pencil between Wally’s buttocks while Wally in his own honking voice said loudly but not shouting, ‘Ow, ow ow,’ as if counting.
After a moment Gary, breathing heavily through his nostrils, pulled the pencil out and tossed it away. Without being told to Wally dropped the newspaper and pulled up his pants.
Just as he did this two things happened. The floorboard underneath me gave a loud tick that made both boys look up, and an adult female voice suddenly musically bellowed, ‘What on earth are you boys doing in here? Get out this minute.’ This was followed by terrible snapping sounds, the plywood boards being with grown-up strength ripped from the door. Slats of light shot in and picked out hurrying dust. Scarlet pushed herself away from the edge, stood up and backed to the window. Not a woman but a man came, with heavy crunches of litter and clattering of debris, into the room below. I’d never seen him before. I caught a glimpse of short grey hair and a reddish T-shirt before I backed from the edge and got to my feet. As in Scooby Doo I tiptoed in reverse. ‘Right, you boys,’ I heard the man say. ‘Out, now. This place is a deathtrap for God’s sake.’ Then my foot went through the floor.
We were an odd foursome in front of Mr Tyrell, the headmaster: Gary, Wally, Scarlet and me. The office was set below the level of the playground, like a bunker. The window’s dark view was of half a dozen concrete steps going up into the yard. Tyrell behind an MFI desk in a squeaking swivel chair with what little light came in glinting on his spectacles, speaking to us very solemnly and slowly about his disappointment in us. I wondered how he stood it in here, that pea-green carpet and the moody wood panelling. Other than the desk and chair only two gunmetal filing cabinets and a few framed school team photographs. Our parents would have to be informed, he said–then when the silent charges detonated visibly realized that Gary didn’t have any and Scarlet’s were absent. Gary snorted quietly, and put his hands in his pockets. Mr Tyrell sighed, sat back in his chair, then as if he’d forgotten until this moment to lose his temper with us leaned forward again and in a very loud voice said if he ever, if he ever, had reason to believe we were anywhere near that house again we would face extremely serious consequences, did we understand? He said did we understand? Wally, shirt still untucked, cried without a sound through the entire interview. Now get out of my sight, all of you.
‘Look,’ Scarlet said to me when we got home. We were in our bedroom, alone. Downstairs we’d left Maude doing her homework at the dining table, my dad with his glasses pushed up on to his forehead watching the ITV news and my mum in the kitchen getting tea ready. Beef and potato and pepper stew, the hot sour of tamarind that like a pair of pincers squeezed your salivary glands. We were both starving after the day’s ordeal. ‘Look at this.’ She took out of her pocket the much-folded piece of newspaper Gary had made Wally look at. ‘I picked it up,’ she said. ‘No one saw.’
It was without doubt the strangest image I’d ever seen.
Five Vietnamese children a few yards apart from each other came down a wet tarmac road towards the camera, loosely shepherded by three helmeted soldiers in the background. Nearest to us, in the left foreground of the shot a boy in a white short-sleeved shirt and dark shorts was doing something extraordinary with his face. It was only crying, this extraordinary thing, but the camera had caught him in such a way that his open mouth looked cartoonishly too big for his face, a rubbery black cavity like Linus’s when he bawled. Back down the road a little girl held a smaller boy’s hand as they hurried towards us. Slightly further back, with her head turned as if to check that the soldiers were still behind them another little girl (she looked about five) was running. The soldiers didn’t look as if they were in a hurry. The side of the road showed rough grass and a hint of puddles. The horizon was a blur of what might have been smoke.
‘Look at her,’ Scarlet said.
The fifth child was exactly in the middle of the shot, a girl who mi
ght have been seven or eight years old. She was completely naked, holding her arms away from herself, wrists limp. The logic of the scene said she was moving towards us but she looked posed with a static grace. As with the boy in the foreground the camera had frozen her mid-scream, and like his mouth hers appeared unnaturally large. You couldn’t believe she was naked, but she was: diaphragm and ribs, navel, thin shadowy mons. Naked in the centre of a wet tarmac road in what looked like the middle of nowhere.
‘There’s something wrong with her,’ Scarlet said. ‘Look at her arm.’
‘Is it burned?’
We fell silent, the picture was so strange. I was thinking of the way Gary had taken it out, then put it away, then taken it out again and made Wally look at it. Never seen one of them before, have you, laddie? The girl’s thing, he meant.
‘What shall we do with it?’ I asked Scarlet.
‘I’m keeping it,’ she said. ‘It’s mine now.’
Two days before the summer holidays I stood alone with the headmaster in his office. Wally had been absent from school since the incident. His parents had been in to see Tyrell. Rumour was filling the school like a gas leak. Something Serious.
‘Are you sure you’re telling me exactly what happened?’