“You. Out.” A percussive whisper in these cases is far more effective than a raised voice.
Knight hesitated briefly. “Sir, it wasn’t—”
“Out!”
Knight fled. I turned on the rest of the group. For a moment I let the silence reverberate between us. No one caught my eye. “As for the rest of you, if I ever have to come in like this again, if I hear as much as a raised voice coming from this room, I will put you all in after-school detention, culprits, associates, and tacit supporters alike. Is that clear?”
Heads nodded. Among the faces I saw Allen-Jones and McNair, Sutcliff, Jackson, and Anderton-Pullitt. Half my form. I shook my head in disgust. “I had thought better of you, 3S. I thought you were gentlemen.”
“Sorry, sir,” muttered Allen-Jones, looking fixedly at his desktop.
“I think it is Mr. Meek who should be receiving the apology,” I said.
“Sorry, sir.”
“Sir.”
“Sir.”
Meek was standing very straight on the podium. My overlarge desk made him seem even smaller and less significant. His doleful face looked to be all eyes and beard, not so much rabbit as capuchin monkey.
“I—hm—thank you, Mr. Straitley. I—think I c-can—hm—m-manage from here now. Boys—ah, hm—”
As I left the room I turned to close the glass-paneled door behind me. For a second I caught Meek watching me from his perch. He turned away almost instantly, but not soon enough for me to have missed the look on his face.
No doubt about it—I made an enemy today. A quiet one, but an enemy nevertheless. Later he will come up to me in the Common Room and thank me for my intervention, but no amount of pretense from either of us can hide the fact that he has been humiliated in front of a class, and that I was the one to see it happen.
Still, that look startled me. It was as if a secret face had opened up behind the comic little beard and bush baby eyes; a face of weak but implacable hatred.
6
I feel like a child in a sweetshop on pocket-money day. Where shall I start? Will it be Pearman, or Bishop, or Straitley, or Strange? Or should I begin lower down, with fat Fallow, who took my father’s place with such boneless arrogance? That stupid half-wit Jimmy? One of the newbies? The Head himself?
I have to admit that I like the idea. But that would be too easy; besides, I want to strike at the heart of St. Oswald’s, not the Head. I want to bring it all down; simply knocking off a few gargoyles won’t do. Places like St. Oswald’s have a habit of coming back to life; wars pass; scandals fade; even murders are eventually forgotten.
Awaiting inspiration I think I’ll bide my time. I find that I feel the same pleasure in being here that I experienced as a child: that feeling of delicious trespass. Very little has changed; the new computers sit uneasily on the new plastic desks whilst the names of Old Oswaldians glare down from the Honors Boards. The smell of the place is slightly different—less cabbage and more plastic, less dust and more deodorant—although the Bell Tower (thanks to Straitley) has retained the original formula of mice, chalk, and sun-warmed trainers.
But the rooms themselves remain the same; and the platforms on which the Masters strode like buccaneers on their quarterdecks; and the wooden floors, inked purple with time and polished to a lethal gloss every Friday night. The Common Room is the same, with its dilapidated chairs; and the Hall; and the Bell Tower. It is a genteel decrepitude, which St. Oswald’s seems to relish—and, more importantly, whispers Tradition to the fee-paying parents.
As a child I felt the weight of that tradition like a physical ache. St. Oswald’s was so different from Sunnybank Park with its bland classrooms and abrasive smell. I felt uneasy at Sunnybank; shunned by the other pupils; contemptuous of the teachers, who dressed in jeans and called us by our first names.
I wanted them to call me Snyde, as they would have done at St. Oswald’s; I wanted to wear a uniform and call them sir. St. Oswald’s Masters still used the cane; by comparison my own school seemed soft and lax. My form teacher was a woman, Jenny McAuleigh. She was young, easygoing, and quite attractive (many of the boys had crushes on her), but all I felt was a deep resentment. There were no women teachers at St. Oswald’s. Yet again I had been given a second-rate substitute.
Over months I was bullied; mocked; scorned by pupils as well as staff. My lunch money stolen; my clothes torn; my books thrown onto the floor. Very soon Sunnybank Park became unbearable. I had no need to feign illness; I had ’flu more often during my first year than I’d ever had in my life before; I suffered from headaches; nightmares; every Monday morning brought an attack of sickness so violent that even my father began to notice.
Once I remember I tried to talk to him. It was a Friday night, and for once he’d decided to stay at home. These evenings in were rare for him, but Pepsi had got a part-time job in a pub in town, I’d been ill with ’flu again for a while, and he’d stayed in and made dinner—nothing special, just boil-in-the-bag and chips, but to me it showed he was making an effort. For once too he was mellow; the six-pack of lager half-finished at his side seemed to have taken some of the edge off his perpetual rage. The TV was on—an episode of The Professionals—and we were watching it in a silence that was companionable for a change rather than sullen. The weekend lay ahead—two whole days away from Sunnybank Park—and I too felt mellow, almost content. There were days like that as well, you know; days when I could have almost believed that to be a Snyde was not the end of the world, and when I thought I could see some kind of a light at the end of Sunnybank Park, a time when none of it would really matter. I looked across at my dad and saw him watching me with a curious expression, a bottle held between his thick fingers.
“Can I have some?” I said, emboldened.
He considered the bottle. “All right,” he said, handing it over. “No more, mind. I don’t want you getting pissed.”
I drank, relishing the bitter taste. I’d had lager before, of course; but never with my father’s approval. I grinned at him, and to my surprise he grinned back, looking quite young for a change, I thought, almost like the boy he must have been once, when he and Mum first met. For the first time really, it crossed my mind that if I’d met him then, I might even have liked that boy as much as she had—that big, soft, skylarking boy—that he and I could perhaps have been friends.
“We do all right without her, kid, don’t we?” said my father, and I felt a jolt of astonishment in the pit of my stomach. He’d read my mind.
“I know it’s been tough,” he said. “Your mum and all that—and now that new school. Bet it’s taken some getting used to, eh, kid?”
I nodded, hardly daring to hope.
“Them headaches, and all that. Them sick notes. You been having trouble at school? Is that it? Other kids been messing you about?”
Once more I nodded. Now, I knew, he would turn away. My father despised cowards. Hit first and hit fast was his personal mantra, along with The bigger they are, the harder they fall, and Sticks and stones may break my bones. But this time he didn’t turn away. Instead he looked straight at me and said, “Don’t worry, kid. I’ll sort it. I promise.”
Now it bloomed, appalling, in my heart. The relief; the hope; the beginnings of joy. My father had guessed. My father had understood. He had promised to sort it. I had a sudden, astonishing vision of him striding up to the gates of Sunnybank Park, my father, eighteen feet tall and splendid in his rage and purpose. I saw him walking up to my principal tormentors and bashing their heads together; running up to Mr. Bray, the Games master, and knocking him down; best and most delightful of all, facing up to Miss McAuleigh, my form teacher, and saying “You can stuff yer bloody school, dearie—we’ve found somewhere else.”