This isn’t the first word that springs to mind, but Howard limits himself to a bland smile.
‘What are you teaching at the moment?’
‘Well, in my last class we were doing the First World War.’
‘Oh!’ She claps her hands. ‘I love the First World War. The boys must be enjoying that.’
‘You’d be surprised,’ he says.
‘You should read them Robert Graves,’ she says.
‘Who?’
‘He was in the trenches,’ she replies; then adds, after a pause, ‘He was also one of the great love poets.’
‘I’ll take a look,’ he scowls. ‘Any other tips for me? Any other lessons you’ve gleaned from your five days in the profession?’
She laughs. ‘If I have any more I’ll be sure and pass them on. It sounds like you need them.’ She lifts the books out of Howard’s arms and aims her car key at the enormous white-gold SUV parked next door to Howard’s dilapidated Bluebird. ‘See you tomorrow,’ she says.
‘Right,’ Howard says.
But she doesn’t move, and neither does he: she holds him there a moment purely by the light of her spectacular eyes, looking him over with the tip of her tongue tucked in the corner of her mouth, as if she is deciding what to have for dinner. Then, smiling at him coyly with a row of pointed white teeth, she says, ‘You know, I’m not going to sleep with you.’
At first Howard is sure he must have misheard her; and when he realizes that he has not, he is still too stunned to reply. So he just stands there, or perhaps totters, and the next thing he knows she’s climbed into her jeep and pulled away, sending white feathers swirling about his ankles.
The door swings open with a creak and you step inside, into the Great Hall. Spiderwebs cover everything, drifting from floor to ceiling like veils from a thousand left-behind brides. You look at the map and go through a door on the far side of the hall. This room used to be the library; books cover the floor in dusty piles. On the table is a scroll, but before you can read it the grandfather clock bursts open and there are one, two, three zombies coming at you! You swipe at them with the torch and duck round the other side of the table, but more appear in the doorway, drawn by the smell of someone alive –
‘Skippy, this is totally boring.’
‘Yeah, Skip, do you think someone else could have a go, maybe?’
‘I’ll just be a second,’ Skippy mumbles, as the zombies pursue him up a rickety staircase.
‘What do you think these zombies do all day?’ Geoff wonders. ‘When there’s no one around they want to eat?’
‘They order pizza,’ Dennis says. ‘Which Mario’s dad delivers.’
‘I told you a thousand times, my father is not a pizza deliveryman, he is an important diplomat in the Italian embassy,’ Mario snaps.
‘Seriously, though, how often is anyone going to call into their creepy house? Like, what do they do, just wander around it all day long, moaning to each other?’
‘They sound sort of like my parents,’ Geoff realizes. He gets up and stretches out his arms and staggers around the room, saying in a sepulchral zombie voice, ‘Geoff… put out the garbage… Geoff… I can’t find my glasses… We’ve made great sacrifices to send you to that school, Geoff…’
Skippy wishes they would stop talking. Heat coils round his brain like a fat snake, tighter and tighter, making his eyelids heavy… and now just for a second the screen blurs, enough time for a raggy arm to fling itself around his neck – he shakes awake, he tries to wriggle free, but it’s too late, they’re all over him, pulling him to the ground, crowding around till he can’t even see himself, their long nails slashing down, their rotten teeth gnashing, and the little spinning light that is his soul whirls up to the ceiling…
‘Game over, Skippy,’ Geoff says in the zombie voice, laying a heavy hand on his shoulder.
‘Finally,’ Mario says. ‘Now can we play something else?’
Skippy’s dorm, like all the other dorms, is in the Tower, which sits at the end of Our Lady’s Hall and is the very oldest part of Seabrook. In days of Yore, when the school was first built, the entire student population ate, slept and sat through classes here; nowadays, day boys form the majority of the pupils, and out of each year of two hundred there are only twenty or thirty unlucky souls who have to come back here after the bell has gone. Any Harry Potter-type fantasies tend to get squashed pretty quickly: life in the Tower, an ancient building composed mostly of draughts, is a deeply unmagical experience, spent at the mercy of lunatic teachers, bullies, athlete’s foot epidemics, etc. There are some small consolations. At a point in life in which the lovely nurturing homes built for them by their parents have become unendurable Guantánomos, and any time spent away from their peers is experienced at best as a mind-numbing commercial break for things no one wants to buy on some old person’s TV channel and at worst as a torture not incomparable to being actually genuinely nailed to a cross, the boarders do enjoy a certain prestige among the boys. They have a sort of sheen of independence; they can cultivate mysterious personae without having to worry about mums or dads showing up and blowing the whole thing by telling people about amusing ‘accidents’ they had when they were little or by publically admonishing them to please stop walking around with their hands wedged in their pockets like a pervert.
Unarguably the best thing about being a boarder, though, is that the Tower overlooks, in spite of the feverish tree-planting efforts of the priests, the yard of St Brigid’s, the girls’ school next door. Every morning, lunchtime and evening the air rings with high feminine voices like lovely secular bells, and at night-time, before they close the curtains, you can see without even needing to look through the telescope – which is a good thing, because Ruprecht is extremely particular about what his telescope is used for, and always keeps it pointed into the girl-less reaches of the sky above – your female counterparts walking around in the upper windows, talking, brushing their hair or even, if you believe Mario, doing naked aerobics. That’s as close as you’ll get, though, because, while it’s the constant subject of plans and boasts and tall tales, no one has ever verifiably breached the wall between the two schools; nor has anyone conceived of a way past the St Brigid’s janitor and his infamous dog, Nipper, not to mention the terrifying Ghost Nun who legend has it roams the grounds after dark wielding either a crucifix or pinking shears, depending on who you talk to.
Ruprecht Van Doren, owner of the telescope and Skippy’s room-mate, is not like the other boys. He arrived at Seabrook in January, like a belated and non-returnable Christmas gift, after both his parents were lost on a kayaking expedition up the Amazon. Prior to their deaths, he had been schooled at home by tutors flown in from Oxford at the behest of his father, Baron Maximilian Van Doren, and consequently he has quite a different attitude to education from his peers. For Ruprecht, the world is a compendium of fascinating facts just waiting to be discovered, and a difficult maths problem is like sinking into a nice warm bath. A cursory glance around the room will give an idea of his current projects and interests. Maps of many kinds cover the walls – maps of the moon, of near and far-off constellations, a map of the world stuck with little pins marking recent UFO sightings – as well as a picture of Einstein and scoresheets commemorating notable Yahtzee victories. The telescope, bearing a sign that reads in big black letters DO NOT TOUCH, points out the window; a French horn gleams pompously from the foot of the bed; on the desk, hidden beneath a sheaf of inscrutable printouts, his computer performs mysterious operations whose full nature is known only to its owner. Impressive as this may be, it represents only a fraction of Ruprecht’s activity, most of which takes place in his ‘lab’, one of the dingy antechambers off the basement. Down here, surrounded by yet more computers and parts of computers, more towers of unfathomable papers and electrical arcana, Ruprecht constructs equations, conducts experiments and continues his pursuit of what he considers the Holy Grail of science: the secret of the origins of the universe.