The Liar [calibre]

'What do you reckon?'

'Yeah, why not? Sounds a laugh.'

'And remember,' said Bullock, 'not a word to anyone.'

'Our lips are sealed,' said Adrian. Lips. Sealed. Dangerous Words. Not five minutes could pass without him thinking of Cartwright.

Bullock took a tobacco tin out of his pocket and looked around the room.

'Now,' he said, 'if someone would close the curtains and light a joss-stick, I have here for your delight some twenty-four-carat black Nepalese cannabis resin which should be smoked immediately on account of it being seriously good shit.'

II

Adrian threw himself along the corridor towards Biffen's form-room. Dr Meddlar, one of the school chaplains, stopped him.

'Late, Healey.'

'Really, sir? So am I.'

Meddlar took him by the shoulders. 'You're riding for a fall, Healey, you know that? There are hedges and ditches ahead and you are on course for an almighty cropper.'

'Sir.'

'And I shall be cheering and laughing as you tumble,' said Meddlar, his spectacles flashing.

'That's just the warm-hearted Christian in you, sir.'

'Listen to me!' spat Meddlar. 'You think you're very clever, don't you? Well let me tell you that this school has no room for creatures like you.'

'Why are you saying this to me, sir?'

'Because if you don't learn to live with others, if you don't conform, your life is going to be one long miserable hell.'

'Will that give you satisfaction, sir? Will that please you?'

Meddlar stared at him and gave a hollow little laugh. 'What , gives you the right to talk to me like that, boy? What on earth do you think gives you the right?'

Adrian was furious to find that there were tears springing to his eyes. 'God gives me the right, sir, because God loves me. And God won't let me be judged by a f-f-fascist - hypocrite -bastard like you!' He squirmed away from Meddlar's grasp and ran on down the corridor. 'Bastard,' he tried to shout, but the words choked in his throat. 'Fucking bloody bastard.'

Meddlar laughed after him. 'You're evil, Healey, quite evil.'

Adrian ran on and out into the quad. Everyone was in morning school. The colonnade was empty, the Old School Room, the library, the headmaster's house, the Founder's lawn, all deserted. This again was Adrian's home, an empty world. He imagined the whole school with noses pressed up against their form-room windows staring out at him as he ran through the West Quad. Prefects with walkie-talkies striding down the corridor, 'This is Blue Seven. Subject proceeding along past the Cavendish library towards the Music School. Over.'

'Blue Seven this is Meddlar. Interview went according to plan, subject now unstable and in tears. Red Three will continue surveillance in the Music School. Over and out.'

Either they've got a life and I'm imaginary, thought Adrian, or I've got a life and they're imaginary.

He'd read all the books, he knew he was really the same as anyone else. But who else had snakes wrestling in their stomachs like this? Who was running beside him with the same desperation? Who else would remember this moment and every moment like it to the last day of their lives? No one. They were all at their desks thinking of rugger and lunch. He was different and alone.

The ground floor of the Music School was filled with little practice-rooms. As Adrian stumbled along the passageway he could hear lessons in progress. A cello pushed a protesting Saint-Saens swan along the water. A trumpet further along farted out 'Thine be the glory'. And there, third from the end, Adrian saw through the glass panel, was Cartwright, making quite a decent fist of a Beethoven minuet.

Fate was always doing this. There were six hundred boys in the school and although Adrian went out of his way to intercept Cartwright and to engineer apparently accidental meetings - he had learnt his time table off by heart - he was sure that he bumped into him by genuine chance more often than was natural.

Cartwright appeared to be alone in the practice-room. Adrian pushed open the door and went in.

'Hi,' he said, 'don't stop, it's good.'

'Oh, it's terrible really,' said Cartwright, 'I can't get the left hand working smoothly.'

'That's not what I've heard,' said Adrian and immediately wanted to bite off his tongue.

Here he was, alone in a room with Cartwright, whose hair was even now leaping with light from the sunshine that poured in through the window, Cartwright whom he loved with his whole life and being and all he could find to say was 'That's not what I've heard.' Jesus, what was the matter with him? He might just as well have put on an Eric Morecambe voice, shouted 'There's no answer to that' and slapped Cartwright's cheeks.

'Um, official lesson?' he said.

'Well, I've got my Grade Three exam in half an hour, so this is a practice. It lets me off double maths at least.'

'Lucky you.'

Lucky you? Oh, pure Oscar Wilde.

'Well, I'd better let you get on with it then, hadn't I?'

Great, Adrian, brilliant. Magisterial. 'I'd better let you get on with it then, hadn't I?' Change one syllable and the whole delicate epigram collapses.

'Right,' said Cartwright and turned back to his music.

'Cheerio, then. G'luck!'

'Bye.'

Adrian closed the door.

Oh God, Oh Godly God.

He wound a fraught trail back to the form-rooms. Thank God it was only Biffen.

'You're extraordinarily late, Healey.'

'Well, sir,' said Adrian, sitting at his desk, 'the way I look at it, better extraordinarily late than extraordinarily never.'

'Perhaps you'd like to tell me what kept you?'

'Not really, sir.'

Something of a gasp ran round the form-room. This was going it a big strong, even for Healey.

'I beg your pardon?'

'Well, not in front of the whole form, sir. It's rather personal.'

'Oh I see. I see,' said Biffen. 'Well, in that case, you had better tell me afterwards.'

'Sir.'

Nothing like getting a schoolmaster's curiosity glands juicing.

Adrian looked out of the window.

'Oh to be in Cartwright, now that March is here.'

Any minute now, some lucky examiner was going to be watching a lovely little frown furrow Cartwright's brow as he skipped through his minuet. Watching the woollen sleeve of his winter jacket ride up his arms.

'Whenas in wool my Cartwright goes, Then, then methinks how sweetly flows, That liquefaction of his clothes.'

He became aware of Biffen's voice knocking at the door of his dreams.

'Can you give us an example, Healey?'

'Er, example, sir?'

'Yes, of a subjunctive following a superlative.'

'A superlative, you say, sir?'

'Yes.'

'A subjunctive following a superlative?'

'Yes, yes.'

'Um . . . how about "legargon leplus beau queje connaisse"}''

'Er . . . the finest boy that I know? Yes that meets the case.'

'Finest, sir? I meant the most beautiful.'

Damn, he was supposed to be phasing out the queer pose. Well, at least it got a laugh.

'Thank you, Healey, that will do. Be quiet, the rest of you, he really doesn't need any encouragement.'

Oh but I do, thought Adrian, I need all the encouragement going.

The lesson moved on, Biffen leaving him alone to daydream.

At the end of the forty minutes he reacted to the bell as fast as he could, streaking to the doorway from the back of the form- room and trying to lose himself in the crowd, but Biffen called him back.

'Aren't you forgetting something, Healey?'

'Sir?'

'You owe me an explanation for your unpunctuality, I think.'

Adrian approached the dais.

'Oh yes, sir. The thing is, sir, I was going to be late anyway - only a bit, but I bumped into Dr Meddlar.'

'He kept you for twenty minutes?'

'Yes, sir - or rather no, sir. He was very rude to me. He upset me, sir.'

'Rude to you? The Chaplain was rude to you?'

'I'm sure that's not how he would put it, sir.' Adrian had a shot at his pure but troubled expression. It was particularly effective when looking up at someone, as he was now. It was loosely based on Dominic Guard's Leo in the film of The Go-Between. A sort of baffled honesty.