The Liar [calibre]

'Graceless, you mean. Wooden.'

Certainly there was nothing obviously appetising about Tom's appearance or manner, and he remained one of the few boys of his year with whom Adrian had never made the beast with two backs, or rather with whom he had never made the beast with one back and an interestingly shaped middle, but over the last year, more people had come to see that there was something arresting about Tom. He wasn't clever, but he worked hard and had set himself to read a great deal, in order, Adrian assumed, to acquire some of Adrian's dash and sparkle. Tom always went his own way with his own ideas. He managed to get away with the longest hair in the House and the most public nicotine habit in the school, somehow without ever drawing attention to himself. It was as if he grew his hair long and smoked cigarettes because he liked to, not because he liked being seen to. This was dangerously subversive.

Freda, the German undermatron, once discovered him sunbathing nude in the spinney.

'Thompson,' she had cried in outrage, 'you cannot be lying about naked!'

'Sorry, Matron, you're right,' Tom murmured, and he had reached out a hand arid put on a pair of mirrored sunglasses. 'Don't know what I was thinking of.'

Adrian felt that it was he who had brought Tom into notice and popularity, that Tom was his own special creation. The silent spotty gink of the first year had been transformed into someone admired and imitated and Adrian wasn't sure how much he liked it.

He liked Tom all right. He was the only person he had ever spoken to about his love for Cartwright and Tom had the decency not to be interested or sympathetic enough to quench the pure holy flame of Adrian's passion with sympathy or advice. Sampson and Bullock he could do without, however. Especially Sampson, who was too much of a grammar-school-type swot ever to be quite the thing. Not an ideal tea-companion at all.

Tea was a very special institution, revolving as it did around the ceremony and worship of Toast. In a place where alcohol, tobacco and drugs were forbidden, it was essential that something should take their place as a powerful and public totem of virility and cool. Toast, for reasons lost in time, was the substance chosen. Its name was dropped on every possible occasion, usually pronounced, in awful public school accents, 'taste'.

'I was just having some toast, when Burton and Hopwood came round . . .'

'Harman's not a bad fag actually. He makes really majorly good toast . . .'

'Yeah, you should come round to my study, maybe, we'll get some toast going . . .'

'God, I can hardly move. I've just completely overdone it on the toast . . .'

Adrian had been looking forward to toasting up with Tom in private and talking about Cartwright.

'Oh, Christ,' he said, clearing a space on his desk for the teapot. 'Oh, Christly Christ.'

'Problem?'

'I shall know no peace other than being kissed by him,' moaned Adrian.

'That a fact?'

'It is a fact, and I'll tell you what else is a fact. It's a fact that he is wearing his blue Shetland turtle-neck today. Even as we speak his body is moving inside it. Warm and quick. It's more than flesh and blood can stand.'

'Have a cold shower, then,' said Tom.

Adrian banged down the teapot and grabbed Tom by the shoulder.

'Cold shower?' he shouted. 'Jessica Christ, man, I'm talking about love! You know what it does to me? It shrinks my stomach, doesn't it, Tom? It pickles my guts, yeah. But what does it do to my mind? It tosses the sandbags overboard so the balloon can soar. Suddenly I'm above the ordinary. I'm competent, supremely competent. I'm walking a tightrope over Niagara Falls. I'm one of the great ones. I'm Michelangelo, moulding the beard of Moses. I'm Van Gogh, painting pure sunlight. I'm Horowitz, playing the Emperor Concerto. I'm John Barrymore before the movies got him by the throat. I'm Jesse James and his two brothers - all three of them. I'm W. Shakespeare. And out there it's not the school any longer - it's the Nile, Tom, the Nile - and down it floats the barge of Cleopatra.'

'Not bad,' said Tom, 'not bad at all. Your own?'

'Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend. But he could have been talking about Cartwright.'

'But he was talking about alcohol,' said Tom, 'which should tell you a lot.'

'Meaning?'

'Meaning shut up and get buttering.'

'I shall put the Liebestod on the stereo, that's what I shall do, you horrid beastly man,' said Adrian, 'and still my beating heart with concord of sweet sounds. But quick, man! - I hear a hansom drawing up outside! And here, Watson, unless I am very much mistaken, is our client now upon the stair. Come in!'

Sampson appeared at the doorway, blinking through his spectacles, followed by Bullock who tossed a jar at Tom.

'Hi. I brought some lemon curd.'

'Lemon curd!' said Adrian. 'And what was I saying only this minute, Tom?' "If only we had some lemon curd for our guests." You're a mind-reader, Bollocks.'

'Some toast over there,' said Tom.

'Thanks, Thompson,' said Sampson, helping himself. 'Good-erson tells me you were not unadjacent to mobbing up R.B.-J. and Sargent in the changing-rooms, Healey.'

'Dame Rumour outstrides me yet again.'

Not unadjacent? Jesus...

Bullock slapped Tom on the back.

'Hey, Tommo!' he said. 'I see you've got Atom Heart Mother at last. What do you reckon? Far outsville or far insville?'

While Tom and Bullock talked about Pink Floyd, Sampson told Adrian why he thought Mahler was in actual fact wilder, in the sense of more controlled, than any rock group.

'That's an interesting point,' said Adrian, 'in the sense of not being interesting at all.'

When the tea and toast were finished, Bullock stood up and cleared his throat.

'I think I should announce my plan now, Sam.'

'Definitely,' said Sampson.

'What ho!' said Adrian, getting up to shut the door. 'Treasons, stratagems and spoils.'

'It's like this,' said Bullock. 'My brother, I don't know if you know, is at Radley, on account of my parents thinking it a bad idea to have us both at the same school.'

'On account of your being twins?' said Adrian.

'Right, on account of my mother OD-ing on fertility drugs. Any old way, he wrote to me last week telling me about an incredible bitch of a row blazing there on account of someone having been and gone and produced an unofficial magazine called Raddled, full of obscene libellous Oz-like filth. And what I thought, what Sammy and I thought, was - why not?'

'Why not what?' said Tom.

'Why not do the same thing here?'

'You mean an underground magazine?'

'Yup.'

Tom opened and shut his mouth. Sampson smirked.

'Jesus suffering fuck,' said Adrian. 'It's not half a thought.'

'Face it, it's a wow.'

'These guys,' said Tom, 'the ones who put out this magazine at Radley. What happened to them?'

Sampson polished his spectacles with the end of his tie.

'Ah, now this is why we must proceed with great circumspection. They were both, hum, "put out" themselves. "Booted out" I believe is the technical phrase.'

'That means it's got to be a secret,' said Bullock. 'We write it in the holidays. You send me the material, typed onto stencils. I get it duplicated on my dad's office Gestetner, bring it back at the beginning of next term, we find a way of distributing it secretly round all the Houses.'

'All a bit Colditz, isn't it?' said Tom.

'No, no!' said Adrian. 'Don't you listen to Thompson, he's an old cynicky-boots. I'm in, Bollocks. I'm in for definite. What sort of material do you want?'

'Oh you know,' said Bullock, 'seditious, anti-public school. That kind of thing. Something to shake them up a bit.'

'I'm planning a sort of fabliau comparing this place with a fascist state,' said Sampson, 'sort of Animal Farm meets Arturo Ui. . .'

'Stop it, Sammy, I'm wet at the very thought,' said Adrian. He looked across at Tom.