“I always knew he was a funny bugger,” said Light. “Bit too chummy with the lads, know what I mean?”
Roach nodded. “Just goes to show,” he said. “You can’t be sure of anyone these days.”
How true that was. I followed the conversation from afar, with a certain sense of ironic amusement. The gentlemen of St. Oswald’s are a trusting lot; keys left in jacket pockets slung over chairs; wallets in desk drawers; offices left unlocked. The theft of a credit card number is the work of a moment; no skill is required, and the card can usually be replaced before the owner even suspects it is missing.
Roach’s card was the only one I failed to return—he reported it missing before I could act—but Bishop, Light, and Grachvogel have no such excuse. My one regret is that I failed to catch Roy Straitley—it would have been elegant to have sent them all to hell in the same handbasket—but the sly old fox doesn’t even own a credit card, and besides, I don’t think anyone would believe that he is computer literate enough to even turn on a PC.
Still, that can change. We’ve only just begun, he and I, and I’ve planned this game for so long that I really don’t want it all to end too quickly. Already he is poised on the brink of dismissal; he remains only in the absence of the Second Master and because the desperate lack of staff members in his department makes him—but only for the duration of the crisis—indispensable.
It’s his birthday on Friday. Bonfire Night: I imagine he’s dreading it; old people so often do. I should send him a present; something nice to take his mind off the week’s unpleasantness. So far I haven’t had any ideas, but then again, I’ve had a lot on my plate recently.
Give me time.
5
I’ve never liked birthdays since, you know. Toys, cake, paper hats, and friends to tea; for years I longed for those things without ever getting them, just as I longed for St. Oswald’s and its enviable patina of wealth and respectability. For his birthdays, Leon went to restaurants, where he was allowed wine and had to wear a tie. Until I was thirteen I had never even been to a restaurant. Waste of money, grumbled John Snyde. Even before my mother left, my birthdays had been hasty occasions; shop-bought cakes and candles that were put away carefully in an old tobacco tin (with last year’s icing-sugar crumbs still clinging to the pastel stubs) for next time. My presents came in Woolworth’s bags, with the labels still on them; we sometimes sang “Happy Birthday to You,” but with the dogged, undemonstrative embarrassment of the working class.
When she left, of course, even that stopped. If he remembered, my father would give me money for my birthdays, telling me to get summat you really want—but I had no friends, no cards, no parties. Once Pepsi made an effort; made pizza with birthday candles on it, and a chocolate cake that had sunk along one side. I tried to be grateful, but I knew I’d been cheated; in a way Pepsi’s simple-minded endeavor was even worse than nothing at all. When there was nothing, I could at least forget what day it was.
But that year was different. That August—I remember it still with the supernatural clarity of certain dreams—hot and sweet and smelling of pepper and gunsmoke and resin and grass. A rapturous, terrible, illuminated time; I was two weeks shy of my thirteenth birthday, and my father was planning a surprise.
He hadn’t said so in as many words; but I could sense it. He was excited; nervous; secretive. He veered from moments of extreme irritation at everything I did to bouts of tearful nostalgia, telling me I was growing up; offering me cans of beer; hoping that when I left home one day I wouldn’t forget my poor old dad, who had always done his best for me.
Most surprisingly, he was spending money. John Snyde—who had always been so tightfisted that he had recycled his used cigarette butts, twisting the reclaimed tobacco into skinny roll-ups that he called “Friday freebies”—had finally discovered the joy of retail therapy. A new suit—for interviews, he said. A gold chain with a medallion on it. A whole crate of Stella Artois—this from a man who purported to despise foreign beers—and six bottles of malt whiskey, which he kept in the shed at the back of the gatehouse, under an old candlewick bedspread.
There were scratch cards—dozens of them; a new sofa; new clothes for me (I was growing); underwear; T-shirts; records; shoes.
Then there were the phone calls. Late at night, when he thought I had gone to bed, I could hear him, talking in a low voice for what seemed like hours at a time. For a while I assumed he was calling a sex line—that or he was trying to get back with Pepsi; there was the same air of furtiveness about his whispering. Once, from the landing, I overheard; only a few words, but words that lodged uncomfortably at the back of my mind.
How much, then? Pause. All right. It’s for the best. The kid needs a mother.
A mother?
Until then my own mother had written daily. Five years without a word, and now there was no stopping her; we were inundated with postcards, letters, parcels. Most of these remained under my bed, unopened. The air ticket to Paris, booked for September, remained unopened, and I thought that perhaps my father had finally accepted that I wanted nothing more from Sharon Snyde; nothing that might remind me of my life before St. Oswald’s.
Then the letters suddenly stopped. In a way that should have troubled me more; it was as if she were planning something, something that she meant to keep from me.
But days passed and nothing happened. The phone calls ceased—or perhaps my father took more care—in any case I heard nothing else, and my thoughts returned, like a compass point, toward my north.
Leon, Leon, Leon. Never far from my thoughts, Francesca’s departure had found him distant and withdrawn. I tried hard to distract him, but nothing seemed to interest him anymore; he disdained all our usual games; zigzagged continually from manically happy to sullen and uncooperative; and worse, now seemed to resent my intrusion into his solitary time, asking me with sarcasm whether I had any other friends and constantly making fun of me for being younger and less experienced than he was himself.
If only he had known. As far as that went, I was light-years ahead. I had conquered Mr. Bray, after all; soon I was to take my conquests further. But with Leon I had always felt awkward, young, painfully eager to please. He sensed it; and now it made him cruel. He was at that age when everything seems sharp and new and obvious; when adults are immeasurably stupid; when the rule of self overrides all others, and a lethal cocktail of hormones amplifies every emotion to a nightmarish intensity.
Worst of all, he was in love. Nail-bitingly, miserably, cruelly in love with Francesca Tynan, who had gone back to school in Cheshire, and with whom he spoke almost every day in secret on the phone, running up enormous bills that would be discovered—too late—at the end of the quarter.
“Nothing else compares,” he said—not for the first time. He was in his manic phase; soon he would lapse into sarcasm and open contempt. “You can talk about it, like the rest of them, but you don’t know what it’s like. Me, I’ve done it. I’ve actually done it. The closest you‘ll ever get is a fumble behind the lockers with your friends from junior six.”
I made a face, keeping it light, pretending it was a joke. But he was not. There was something vicious, almost feral about Leon on these occasions; his hair hung over his eyes; his face was pale; a sour smell came from his body; and there was a new scattering of pimples around his sullen mouth.