‘There you go.’ Millat lit up, blowing smoke in the headmaster’s direction. The headmaster coughed like an old woman. ‘OK, Millat, you first. Because I expect this of you, at least. Spill the legumes.’
Millat said, ‘I was round there, the back of the science block, on a matter of spiritual growth.’
The headmaster leant forward and tapped the church spire against his lips a few times. ‘You’re going to have to give me a little more to work on, Millat. If there’s some religious connection here, it can only work in your favour, but I need to know about it.’
Millat elaborated, ‘I was talking to my mate. Hifan.’
The headmaster shook his head. ‘I’m not following you, Millat.’
‘He’s a spiritual leader. I was getting some advice.’
‘Spiritual leader? Hifan? Is he in the school? Are we talking cult here, Millat? I need to know if we’re talking cult.’
‘No, it’s not a bloody cult,’ barked Irie exasperated. ‘Can we get on with it? I’ve got viola in ten minutes.’
‘Millat’s speaking, Irie. We’re listening to Millat. And hopefully when we get to you, Millat will give you a bit more respect than you’ve just showed him. OK? We’ve got to have communication. OK, Millat. Go on. What kind of spiritual leader?’
‘Muslim. He was helping me with my faith, yeah? He’s the head of the Cricklewood branch of the Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation.’
The headmaster frowned. ‘KEVIN?’
‘They are aware they have an acronym problem,’ explained Irie.
‘So,’ continued the headmaster eagerly, ‘this guy from KEVIN. Was he the one who was supplying the gear?’
‘No,’ said Millat, stubbing his fag out on the windowsill. ‘It was my gear. He was talking to me, and I was smoking it.’
‘Look,’ said Irie, after a few more minutes of circular conversation. ‘It’s very simple. It was Millat’s gear. I smoked it without really thinking, then I gave it to Joshua to hold for a second while I tied my shoelace but he really had nothing to do with it. OK? Can we go now?’
‘Yes, I did!’
Irie turned to Joshua. ‘What?’
‘She’s trying to cover for me. Some of it was my marijuana. I was dealing marijuana. Then the pigs jumped me.’
‘Oh, Jesus Christ. Chalfen, you’re nuts.’
Maybe. But in the past two days, Joshua had gained more respect, been patted on the back by more people, and generally lorded it around more than he ever had in his life. Some of the glamour of Millat seemed to have rubbed off on him by association, and as for Irie – well, he’d allowed a ‘vague interest’ to develop, in the past two days, into a full-blown crush. Wipe that. He had a full-blown crush on both of them. There was something compelling about them. More so than Elgin the dwarf or Moloch the sorcerer. He liked being connected with them, however tenuously. He had been plucked by the two of them out of nerddom, accidentally whisked from obscurity into the school spotlight. He wasn’t going back without a struggle.
‘Is this true, Joshua?’
‘Yes… umm, it started small, but now I believe I have a real problem. I don’t want to deal drugs, obviously I don’t, but it’s like a compulsion-’
‘Oh, for God’s sake…’
‘Now, Irie, you have to let Joshua have his say. His say is as valid as your say.’
Millat reached over to the headmaster’s pocket and pulled out his heavy packet of tobacco. He poured the contents out on to the small coffee table.
‘Oi. Chalfen. Ghetto-boy. Measure out an eighth.’
Joshua looked at the stinking mountain of brown. ‘A European eighth or an English eighth?’
‘Could you just do as Millat suggests,’ said the headmaster irritably, leaning forward in his chair to inspect the tobacco. ‘So we can settle this.’
Fingers shaking, Joshua drew a section of tobacco on to his palm and held it up. The headmaster brought Joshua’s hand up under Millat’s nose for inspection.
‘Barely a five-pound draw,’ said Millat scornfully. ‘I wouldn’t buy shit from you.’
‘OK, Joshua,’ said the headmaster, putting the tobacco back in its pouch. ‘I think we can safely say the game’s up. Even I knew that wasn’t anywhere near an eighth. But it does concern me that you felt the need to lie and we’re going to have to schedule a time to talk about that.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘In the meantime, I’ve talked to your parents, and in line with the school policy move away from behaviour chastisement and towards constructive conduct management, they’ve very generously suggested a two-month programme.’
‘Programme?’
‘Every Tuesday and Thursday, you, Millat, and you, Irie, will go to Joshua’s house and join him in a two-hour after-school study group split between maths and biology, your weaker subjects and his stronger.’
Irie snorted, ‘You’re not serious?’
‘You know, I am serious. I think it’s a really interesting idea. This way Joshua’s strengths can be shared equally amongst you, and the two of you can go to a stable environment, and one with the added advantage of keeping you both off the streets. I’ve talked to your parents and they are happy with the, you know, arrangement. And what’s really exciting is that Joshua’s father is something of an eminent scientist and his mother is a horticulturalist, I believe, so, you know, you’ll really get a lot out of it. You two have a lot of potential, but I feel you’re getting caught up with things that really are damaging to that potential – whether that’s family environment or personal hassles, I don’t know – but this is a really good opportunity to escape those. I hope you’ll see that it’s more than punishment. It’s constructive. It’s people helping people. And I really hope you’ll do this wholeheartedly, you know? This kind of thing is very much in the history, the spirit, the whole ethos of Glenard Oak, ever since Sir Glenard himself.’
The history, spirit and ethos of Glenard Oak, as any Glenardian worth their salt knew, could be traced back to Sir Edmund Flecker Glenard (1842- 1907), whom the school had decided to remember as their kindly Victorian benefactor. The official party line stated that Glenard had donated the money for the original building out of a devoted interest in the social improvement of the disadvantaged. Rather than workhouse, the official PTA booklet described it as a ‘shelter, workplace and educational institute’ used in its time by a mixture of English and Caribbean people. According to the PTA booklet, the founder of Glenard Oak was an educational philanthropist. But then, according to the PTA booklet, ‘post-class aberration consideration period’ was a suitable replacement for the word ‘detention’.
A more thorough investigation in the archives of the local Grange Library would reveal Sir Edmund Flecker Glenard as a successful colonial who had made a pretty sum in Jamaica farming tobacco, or rather overseeing great tracts of land where tobacco was being farmed. At the end of twenty years of this, having acquired far more money than was necessary, Sir Edmund sat back in his impressive leather armchair and asked himself if there were not something he could do. Something to send him into his dotage cushioned by a feeling of goodwill and worthiness. Something for the people. The ones he could see from his window. Out there in the field.
For a few months Sir Edmund was stumped. Then one Sunday, while taking a leisurely late afternoon stroll through Kingston, he heard a familiar sound that struck him differently. Godly singing. Hand-clapping. Weeping and wailing. Noise and heat and ecstatic movement coming from church after church and moving through the thick air of Jamaica like a choir invisible. Now, there was something, thought Sir Edmund. For, unlike many of his ex-patriot peers, who branded the singing caterwauling and accused it of being heathen, Sir Edmund had always been touched by the devotion of Jamaican Christians. He liked the idea of a jolly church, where one could sniff or cough or make a sudden movement without the vicar looking at one queerly. Sir Edmund felt certain that God, in all his wisdom, had never meant church to be a stiff-collared miserable affair as it was in Tunbridge Wells, but rather a joyous thing, a singing and dancing thing, a foot-stamping hand-clapping thing. The Jamaicans understood this. Sometimes it seemed to be the only thing they did understand. Stopping for a moment outside one particularly vibrant church, Sir Edmund took the opportunity to muse upon this conundrum: the remarkable difference between a Jamaican’s devotion to his God in comparison to his devotion towards his employer. It was a subject he’d had cause to consider many times in the past. Only this month, as he sat in his study trying to concentrate on the problem he had set himself, his wardens came to him with news of three strikes, various men found asleep or drugged while at work, and a whole collective of mothers (Bowden women amongst them) complaining about low pay, refusing to work. Now you see, that was the rub of it, right there. You could get a Jamaican to pray any hour of the day or night, they would roll into church for any date of religious note, even the most obscure – but if you took your eye off ’em for one minute in the tobacco fields, then work ground to a halt. When they worshipped they were full of energy, moving like jumping beans, bawling in the aisles… yet when they worked they were sullen and uncooperative. The question so puzzled him he had written a letter on the subject to the Gleaner earlier in the year inviting correspondence, but received no satisfactory replies. The more Edmund thought about it, the more it became clear to him that the situation was quite the opposite in England. One was impressed by the Jamaican’s faith but despairing of his work ethic and education. Vice versa, one admired the Englishman’s work ethic and education but despaired of his poorly kept faith. And now, as Sir Edmund turned to go back to his estate, he realized that he was in a position to influence the situation – nay, more than that – transform it! Sir Edmund, who was a fairly corpulent man, a man who looked as if he might be hiding another man within him, practically skipped all the way home.