He went off to play football, Tarzan at the Earth's Core shoved down the back of his scratchy blue football shorts.
He hated the showers and the baths. He couldn't understand why they had to use both, but that was just the way it was.
He was freezing, and no good at games. It was beginning to become a matter of perverse pride with him that in his years at the school so far, he hadn't scored a goal, or hit a run, or bowled anyone out, or done anything much except be the last person to be picked when choosing sides.
Elric, proud pale prince of the Melniboneans, would never have had to stand around on a football pitch in the middle of winter, wishing the game would be over.
Steam from the shower room, and his inner thighs were chapped and red. The boys stood naked and shivering in a line, waiting to get under the showers and then to get into the baths.
Mr Murchison, eyes wild and face leathery and wrinkled, old and almost bald, stood in the changing rooms directing naked boys into the shower, then out of the shower and into the baths. "You boy. Silly little boy. Jamieson. Into the shower, Jamieson. Atkinson, you baby, get under it properly. Smiggins, into the bath. Goring, take his place in the shower…"
The showers were too hot. The baths were freezing cold and muddy.
When Mr Murchison wasn't around, boys would flick each other with towels, joke about each others' penises, about who had pubic hair, who didn't.
"Don't be an idiot," hissed someone near Richard. "What if the Murch comes back. He'll kill you." There was some nervous giggling.
Richard turned and looked. An older boy had an erection, was rubbing his hand up and down it slowly under the shower, displaying it proudly to the room.
Richard turned away.
Forgery was too easy.
Richard could do a passable imitation of the Murch's signature, for example, and an excellent version of his housemaster's handwriting and signature. His housemaster was a tall, bald, dry man named Trellis. They had disliked each other for years.
Richard used the signatures to get blank exercise books from the stationery office, which dispensed paper, pencils, pens and rulers on the production of a note signed by a teacher.
Richard wrote stories and poems and drew pictures in the exercise books.
After the bath, Richard towelled himself off and dressed hurriedly; he had a book to get back to, a lost world to return to.
He walked out of the building slowly, tie askew, shirttail flapping, reading about Lord Greystoke, wondering whether there really was a world inside the world where dinosaurs flew and it was never night.
The daylight was beginning to go, but there were still a number of boys outside the school, playing with tennis balls: a couple played conkers by the bench. Richard leaned against the redbrick wall and read, the outside world closed off, the indignities of changing rooms forgotten.
"You're a disgrace, Grey."
Me?
"Look at you. Your tie's all crooked. You're a disgrace to the school. That's what you are."
The boy's name was Lindfield, two school years above him, but already as big as an adult. "Look at your tie. I mean, look at it." Lindfield pulled at Richard's green tie, pulled it tight into a hard little knot. "Pathetic."
Lindfield and his friends wandered off.
Elric of Melnibone was standing by the redbrick walls of the school building, staring at him. Richard pulled at the knot in his tie, trying to loosen it. It was cutting into his throat.
His hands fumbled around his neck.
He couldn't breathe; but he was not concerned about breathing. He was worried about standing. Richard had suddenly forgotten how to stand. It was a relief to discover how soft the brick path he was standing on had become as it slowly came up to embrace him.
They were standing together under a night sky hung with a thousand huge stars, by the ruins of what might once have been an ancient temple.
Elric's ruby eyes stared down at him. They looked, Richard thought, like the eyes of a particularly vicious white rabbit that Richard had once had, before it gnawed through the wire of the cage and fled into the Sussex countryside to terrify innocent foxes. His skin was perfectly white; his armour, ornate and elegant, traced with intricate patterns, perfectly black. His fine white hair blew about his shoulders as if in a breeze, but the air was still.
-So you want to be a companion to heroes? he asked. His voice was gentler than Richard had imagined it would be.
Richard nodded.
Elric put one long finger beneath Richard's chin, lifted his face up. Blood eyes, thought Richard. Blood eyes.
-You're no companion, boy, he said in the High Speech of Melnibone.
Richard had always known he would understand the High Speech when he heard it, even if his Latin and French had always been weak.
-Well, what am I, then? he asked. Please tell me. Please?
Elric made no response. He walked away from Richard, into the ruined temple.
Richard ran after him.
Inside the temple Richard found a life waiting for him, all ready to be worn and lived, and inside that life, another. Each life he tried on, he slipped into and it pulled him farther in, farther away from the world he came from; one by one, existence following existence, rivers of dreams and fields of stars, a hawk with a sparrow clutched in its talons flies low above the grass, and here are tiny intricate people waiting for him to fill their heads with life, and thousands of years pass and he is engaged in strange work of great importance and sharp beauty, and he is loved, and he is honoured, and then a pull, a sharp tug, and it's…
…it was like coming up from the bottom of the deep end of a swimming pool. Stars appeared above him and dropped away and dissolved into blues and greens, and it was with a deep sense of disappointment that he became Richard Grey and came to himself once more, filled with an unfamiliar emotion. The emotion was a specific one, so specific that he was surprised, later, to realise that it did not have its own name: a feeling of disgust and regret at having to return to something he had thought long since done with and abandoned and forgotten and dead.
Richard was lying on the ground, and Lindfield was pulling at the tiny knot of his tie. There were other boys around, faces staring down at him, worried, concerned, scared.
Lindfield pulled the tie loose. Richard struggled to pull air, he gulped it, clawed it into his lungs.
"We thought you were faking. You just went over." Someone said that.
"Shut up," said Lindfield. "Are you all right? I'm sorry. I'm really sorry. Christ. I'm sorry."
For one moment, Richard thought he was apologizing for having called him back from the world beyond the temple.
Lindfield was terrified, solicitous, desperately worried. He had obviously never almost killed anyone before. As he walked Richard up the stone steps to the matron's office, Lindfield explained that he had returned from the school tuck-shop, found Richard unconscious on the path, surrounded by curious boys, and had realised what was wrong. Richard rested for a little in the matron's office, where he was given a bitter soluble aspirin, from a huge jar, in a plastic tumbler of water, then was shown in to the headmaster's study.
"God, but you look scruffy, Grey!" said the headmaster, puffing irritably on his pipe. "I don't blame young Lindfield at all. Anyway, he saved your life. I don't want to hear another word about it."
"I'm sorry," said Grey.
"That will be all," said the headmaster in his cloud of scented smoke.
"Have you picked a religion yet?" asked the school chaplain, Mr Aliquid.
Richard shook his head. "I've got quite a few to choose from," he admitted.
The school chaplain was also Richard's biology teacher. He had recently taken Richard's biology class, fifteen thirteen-year-old boys and Richard, just twelve, across the road to his little house opposite the school. In the garden Mr Aliquid had killed, skinned, and dismembered a rabbit with a small sharp knife. Then he'd taken a foot pump and blown up the rabbit's bladder like a balloon until it had popped, spattering the boys with blood. Richard threw up, but he was the only one who did.