Timothy Gedge, like all the others, had considered O’Hennessy to be touched in the head, but then O’Hennessy said something that made him less certain about that. Everyone was good at something, he said, nobody was without talent: it was a question of discovering yourself. O’Hennessy was at the Comprehensive for only half a term, and was then replaced by Miss Wilkinson.
It seemed to Timothy that he was good at nothing, but he also was increasingly beginning to wonder if he wished to spend a lifetime making sandpaper. He thought about himself, as Brehon O’Hennessy had said he should. He closed his eyes and saw himself, again following Brehon O’Hennessy’s injunction. He saw himself as an adult, getting up in the morning and taking food, and then reporting to the cutting room of the sandpaper factory. Seeking to discover an absorbing interest, which might even become an avenue to a fuller life, he bought a model-aeroplane kit, but unfortunately he found the construction work difficult. The balsa wood kept splitting and the recommended glue didn’t seem to stick the pieces together properly. He lost some of them, and after a couple of days he gave the whole thing up. It was a great disappointment to him. He’d imagined flying the clever little plane on the beach, getting the engine going and showing people how it was done. He’d imagined making other aircraft, building up quite a collection of them, using dope like it said in the instructions, covering the wings with tissue paper. It would all have taken hours, sitting contentedly in the kitchen with the radio on while his mother and sister were out in the evenings, as they generally were. But it was not to be.
Then, on the afternoon of December 4th last, something else happened: Miss Wilkinson ordered that the two laundry baskets containing the school’s dressing-up clothes should be carried into the classroom and she made the whole of 3A dress up so that they could enact scenes from history. She called it a game. ‘The game of charades,’ she said. ‘Charrada. From the Spanish, the chatter of the clown.’ She divided 3A into five groups and gave each an historical incident to act. The others had to guess what it was. Nobody had listened when she’d said that a word came from the Spanish and meant the chatter of a clown; within five minutes the classroom was a bedlam. The eight children in Timothy Gedge’s group laughed uproariously when he dressed up as Queen Elizabeth I, in a red wig and a garment that had a lank white ruff at its neck. Timothy laughed himself, seeing in a mirror how peculiar he looked, with a pair of tights stuffed into the dress to give him a bosom. He enjoyed laughing at himself and being laughed at. He enjoyed the feel of the wig on his head and the different feeling the long voluminous dress gave him, turning him into another person.
It was the only occasion he had ever enjoyed at Dynmouth Comprehensive and it was crowned by his discovery that without any difficulty whatsoever he could adopt a falsetto voice. That night he’d lain awake in bed, imagining a future that was different in every way from a future in the sandpaper factory. ‘Charrada,’ Miss Wilkinson repeated in a dream. ‘The chatter of the clown.’
He’d felt aimless in his adolescence before that. After he’d failed with the model-aeroplane kit he’d taken to following people about just to see where they were going, and looking through the windows of people’s houses. He’d found himself regularly attending funerals because for some reason there was enjoyment of a kind to be derived from standing in the graveyard of the church of St Simon and St Jude or the graveyard of the Baptist, Methodist or Catholic churches, while solemn words were said and mourners paid respects. He continued to follow people about and to look through windows and to attend funerals, but he had also determined to enter the Spot the Talent competition at the Easter Fête with a comic act and he now spent a considerable amount of his spare time trying to work out what it should be. He instinctively felt that somehow it should incorporate the notion of death, that whatever charrada he devised should be of a macabre nature.
In bed at night he thought about this, and continued to do so during geography lessons and tedious mathematics lessons, staring ahead of him in a manner that was complained of as vacant. He would smile when he was insulted in this way and for a moment would pay attention to a droning voice retailing information about the distribution of herring-beds around the shores of the British Isles or incomprehensibly speaking French. He would then revert to his more personal riddle of how to reconcile death and comedy in a theatrical act. He wondered about presenting himself as a female mourner, in a black dress down to his feet and a veiled black hat, with cheekily relevant chatter. But somehow that didn’t seem complete, or even right. Then, a month ago, Mr Stringer had taken forty pupils to London and had included in the itinerary a visit to Madame Tussaud’s. At half past eleven that morning Timothy Gedge had found the solution he was looking for: he decided to base his comic act on the deaths of Miss Munday, Mrs Burnham and Miss Lofty, the Brides in the Bath, the victims of George Joseph Smith. All the way back to Dynmouth on the coach he’d imagined the act. To applause and laughter in the marquee at the Easter Fête, he rose from an old tin bath while the limelight settled on the wedding-dress he wore and his chatter began. He’d never in his life seen Benny Hill, or anyone else, attempting an act in a long white wedding-dress, impersonating three deceased women. It made him chortle so much in the coach that Mr Stringer asked him if he was going to be sick.
The rain had increased by the time he reached Cornerways. It dripped from his face and hair. He could feel areas of damp on his back and his stomach. His legs and arms were drenched. In the flat he removed some of the wet clothes in order to practise his act. He didn’t turn the television on because he liked the flat to be quiet when he was practising.
In his sister’s bedroom he eased himself into a pair of black tights. A torn toenail caught in the fine mesh of the material, creating an immediate hole. The same thing had happened once before and then he’d felt something else going as soon as he sat down. Rose-Ann had gone on about the damage for quite some time and had eventually taken the tights back to the shop, where she’d been received with hostility.
He regarded himself in the long Woolworth’s mirror that Rose-Ann’s boyfriend Len had fixed up for her on the inside of her cupboard door. He still wore his own yellow T-shirt; the tights were taut on his calves and thighs. The hole his toenail had caused was round the back somewhere, which was a relief because Rose-Ann mightn’t even notice it. He picked up a flowered brassiere and held it for a moment against his chest, examining the effect in the mirror. He had perfected his own method with his sister’s brassieres, employing two rubber bands to bridge the gap at the back.
He took off his shirt, selected a pair of Rose-Ann’s ankle socks, knotted the rubber bands and attached them securely to the brassiere’s hooks. He then slipped the garment over his head, wriggled his way into it, and stuffed an ankle sock into each cup. He put on a dress that was too big for Rose-Ann, which had been given to her by a friend. It wasn’t too big for him. It was wine-coloured, with small black buttons.