‘Would you mind repeating what you just said?’ snapped Judy Brisby, remembering the power of her days as a matron. ‘I think we’d all like to hear it.’ But her power was only a memory.
‘Certainly,’ said Julian with a smile. ‘I said: “Poor kid!”’
She was trussed, she was basted, she was oven ready. The boy agent QM had defeated the fiend from Smersh (or did she answer to Spectre?). He was fully entitled to blow the smoke casually from his strong index and middle fingers, the double barrels of his Beretta. He had earned the double-0 prefix, his licence to kill. He was 00QM as far as I was concerned, outright head of the Secret Service, but nobody missed Judy Brisby and she was never mentioned again.
I try to avoid passing severe judgements on my fellow beings, but I have to admit I’m pretty unforgiving when it comes to Judy Brisby. I take a rather vindictive line with her. I hope she has many future lives. There — I’ve said it. No taking back.
Luke Squires was much on my mind, but I also kept my distance from him. He would roll past me from time to time in his nifty wheelchair and squeeze his groin as he went by. I was terrified of getting caught if I responded. At the beginning of the new term senior boys had circulated warnings that ‘any boy found indulging in homosexual practices’ was to be expelled. Then Terence Wilberforce and another boy were caught in the act by Miss Salisbury and told to report to Raeburn. Miss Salisbury had a nerve turning them in, I thought, when she spent so much of her spare time head down in Miss Dawkins’ lap. Terence and his co-accused went in prepared for the worst, hoping for pain rather than expulsion. They would prefer a beating, however savage, to the end of the only education they could hope for.
A group of us mustered outside Raeburn’s study. If poor bed-wetting Roger Stott couldn’t sit down for days after being on the receiving end of the Board of Education, what would be the punishment for taboo practices with another boy? From the other side of the door came a silence we took to be ominous. Time went by, and someone set his ear against the solid wood of the door. He could hear murmurings from within, but not what was being said.
The suspense was killing. It was torture being outside that door, not knowing what torture was in progress on the other side of it. If it was worse than what we were going through, then it was terrible indeed. Finally Terence hobbled out of the office — but as he had hobbled in, that didn’t signify. He was moving quite normally and smiling. Had Raeburn tried to wallop their bottoms? Had he broken the spare Board of Education in the frenzy of his walloping?
No, Raeburn hadn’t walloped them. Not at all. He had offered them a small sherry. They were close to being adults, after all — wasn’t that what this chat should be about? Then he explained that nothing shocked or surprised him, after being in the Army. Boys of their age were naturally curious. However, Marion did get rather upset by this sort of thing, and she wasn’t alone in that. He advised them to be careful, and ended the interview by saying that if they had any questions on this particular subject, to come and see him any time at all. At the start of the day I had been thanking God Almighty that I hadn’t been one of the boys caught in the act, and I ended up almost blaming Him for depriving me of that glass of sherry and the friendly chat.
So perhaps the risks weren’t impossible to contemplate after all. I tried to imagine the best place to explore the warming mound in Luke’s lap. There were so many new nooks and crannies to the new premises. Luke must have rubbed his hands together (against his groin, naturally) when he saw the plans — if that ever really happened — to see so many protected new spaces. Exploitable little pockets for potential sensuality.
After any number of delays and teething problems the new dormitory block was opened, and so was the new classroom block. Initially being a pupil of Vulcan had really been like living in a castle, but now the main building was the hub, and the new dormitory block and the new classrooms were like two arms spidering out in opposite directions from the original school.
Marching papers
The new dormitories were on ground level, which was a manifest improvement. It was never anywhere near as cold as it had been in that castle turret. The facilities were better, with one bathroom between each pair of dorms. I was being given a bath there one November day when shouting seemed to burst out from a number of places at once. All I could hear was, ‘Kenny’s dead!’ which made me very sad. I had liked Mr Kenny the maths teacher. He had beautiful hand-writing on the blackboard. His emotions were always close to the surface. In one lesson I couldn’t concentrate because my knee was so sore. He asked me why I was finding the lesson so difficult and I explained. After the lesson he stroked my knee and said some sort of prayer over it. He told me about a spiritual healer called Rebecca Beard. He had read her book Everyman’s Search and was convinced she was on to something. There were tears in his eyes.
It wasn’t that sort of touch which had got him into trouble, though. Mr Kenny had been dismissed (wrongfully, to my way of thinking) for hitting Bernard Baines, a provoking lad who dressed as a Teddy boy and listened to Buddy Holly on his Grundig tape-recorder. In any case Bernard had hit back with far greater force and given Mr Kenny a black eye, as well as his marching papers by grassing him up. Now Mr Kenny had ended his life, and his death would lie on Bernard’s conscience with all the weight (I was sure about this) of a feather. Still, the school would remember him, and I would return the favour of the prayers he said over my hot and angry knee.
Of course it wasn’t Kenny at all. It was Kennedy, the American president, who had died. Mr Kenny moved to Australia and wrote me nice letters.
One strange thing about the new dorm was that our filthy radio plays stopped dead, or (putting it another way) never got started after the change of address. The new environment had an acoustic that deadened our fantasies. Perhaps the Castle itself really had been an accomplice — the Grey Lady herself needing a few cheap thrills to beguile the tedium of non-existence. Or else it was simply that I had begun to lose interest and was looking for an excuse to let it drop. Without me to cook, mother and whore my way through the narrative every night, the carnival was over.
To make love like Ten
These days I was more interested in Luke Squires, though I was also fascinated by a new pupil called Jimmy Kettle. He hardly seemed like a pupil at all. He was older than me, fifteen or even sixteen, and American. James Charles Kettle III. He was certainly old enough that he needed to shave — I remember that. He hardly seemed to need any education, since he was sophisticated to a terrifying degree. This isn’t normally a character profile which fills teachers with admiration, but Jimmy had no trouble in getting away with it. Teachers never resented him missing their lessons — it was rather the other way round. They were surprised and delighted if he chose to turn up, but also almost nervous. It was as if they knew they must perform at the peak of their powers to have a chance of holding his attention.
Jimmy didn’t feel the need to stay at Vulcan for the whole term. He was free to pick and choose his school-days. His home was in Paris with his glamorous mother, who was often away on her travels. She was rich enough to treat the school more or less as an Otel for her son on those occasions, and the school was poor enough to accept such a pupil on any terms whatsoever. Jimmy was spastic, not quite athetoid but certainly on the borderline of that unhappy state. He was less able to control his involuntary movements than Luke, especially when he was tired. On the other hand, he enjoyed the advantage over Luke that his spasms didn’t affect his legs too much, so his walking was reasonably assured. He didn’t need a chair. Luke and he didn’t get on, which was virtually inevitable. They were fighting to monopolise the very small amount of spastic mystique available.