‘What was that?’ Ben asked.
‘Nothing.’
‘You want to stop that, mac, muttering to yirsel’. It’s a bad habit in here.’
Frank wanted to ask Ben more about the shock treatment but he couldn’t face it. A desperate weariness had come over him.
‘What did Wilson have to say?’ Ben asked.
‘Just that they haven’t found my brother yet.’
‘Did you think any more about calling that old pal of yours?’
Frank didn’t answer, just looked down at his feet. He still wasn’t quite sure it was safe.
Ben left Frank in the day room. Patients were sitting round the television watching Fanny Cradock demonstrating how to make sauerkraut. Some were sitting round the table cutting up strips of paper with blunt children’s scissors; although it was still over a month to Christmas the patients had already been set to making decorations. Mr Martindale wasn’t on the ward any more; after his outburst he had been sent to one of the padded cells.
Frank slunk off to the quiet room, taking his habitual position in the easy chair, facing the window. He thought of his flat in Birmingham; would anyone have tidied it up? He had liked his flat, dingy though it was. Only Birmingham was so far from the sea. He had always loved the sea, ever since he and his mother had gone to visit a cousin of his father in Skegness, when he was ten. Edgar hadn’t come; he was on a school trip to France. Frank had spent days wandering the sands on his own; the beach was full of holidaymakers but the sea was so vast and blank, yet always moving. It was too cold to swim; he had paddled in the surf but even that had made his feet ache, and yet he would have loved to disappear into the water. His mother, back at his father’s cousin’s, would be trying to persuade them of the spirit world just beyond and Mrs Baker’s unique contact with it. They were never invited again.
Over the past few days Frank had thought about killing himself, taking his secret away with him for ever, rather than risking anyone finding out, even David. But he knew he didn’t have the courage. And they were always on the watch in here. The blunt knives and forks the patients used were counted after each meal, and there were no strong light fittings in the rooms to hang a rope from. There was a big picture, though, on the nicotine-yellow wall in the quiet room, a Victorian painting of a stag at bay in the Highlands; there must be a strong nail or hook holding it to the wall. Frank closed his eyes, his body shuddering involuntarily. He didn’t want to die, though he had sometimes yearned to do so at school. He wished he could stop thinking about that place.
Strangmans College was a long square block of a building set on a bleak, windy hillside just outside Edinburgh. One of the city’s many private schools. A Victorian headmaster had moved the institution to a new site, where the bracing air would be good for the boys.
It had been bracing all right, when Frank got off the school coach which had met him at Waverley Station, that Sunday afternoon in 1928. A gale was blowing off the Forth, full of freezing rain. It almost knocked him off his feet. There were three other new boarders on the coach – most Strangmans pupils were day boys but there was a minority of boarders – and the four eleven-year-olds in their new red uniforms stood there frightened and apprehensive, each clutching his red cap against the wind.
Frank stared down the drive at the sandstone building. It seemed huge, still a reddish yellow though all the buildings he had passed in Edinburgh were black with soot, worse than London. The day boys would not arrive for the start of term until next day and the place seemed deserted. Frank had hoped that Edgar, who had travelled up the day before, might be there to welcome him, but there was only a master with a clipboard, a tall, spare man in hat and raincoat with glasses and a severe expression.
Frank was still looking around in the hope of seeing Edgar when a sharp poke in the ribs made him jump. ‘Hey,’ the teacher said in a sharp voice. ‘You’re in a dream, laddie!’ The long ‘R’ made it sound like ‘drrream’. ‘Whit’s yer name? Are you Muncaster?’
‘Yes. I’m Frank.’
The man frowned. ‘Yes, what?’
Frank stared at him blankly.
‘Yes, sir. You call the masters “sir” here. And you’re Muncaster minor, the boys get called by their last names.’ He frowned again. ‘Take that silly grin off yer face. What are ye grinning at me like that for?’ One of the other boys tittered. Frank held himself rigid, fighting a frantic urge to run away.
The master led the boys to an annexe behind the main building, where he took them into a bleak room with four iron beds, a locker beside each. Rain lashed and spat at the windows. ‘This is your dormitory,’ the master said. ‘Number 8, remember that. I’m Mr Ritner and your form number is 4B. Remember, 4B. There’ll be tea at four, the dining room’s on the first floor. Get yourselves unpacked now, go on.’ He walked off, footsteps clumping on the bare boards. Frank stood gawping, the rapped instructions swirling in his head.
At tea, served in a corner of a huge dining room filled with long benches, Edgar appeared along with a dozen other boarders of various ages. Edgar was fifteen now, tall and broad, a junior prefect with a tassel on his cap. He sat beside Frank and spoke to him quietly. ‘So you’re here.’
‘Hullo, Edgar. Gosh, it’s good to see you.’
His brother’s look was stony. ‘Listen, Frank, just cos you’re my brother disnae mean we see each other at school. Understand?’ His voice had taken on the local accent. ‘You’re just another wee tiddler. You don’t bother me, right? I’m in the seniors’ bug-hut so you won’t see much of me anyway.’
‘Bug-hut?’
‘It’s what we call the boarding houses,’ Edgar answered impatiently, as though Frank should have known. He got up. ‘You have to stand on your own two feet here. That’s the Strangmans way. You’ll need to toughen up.’
In the days that followed Frank was in a constant panic; he couldn’t find his way round the enormous building where huge crowds of boys now milled or walked along in lines. Several times, lost, he asked other boys the way but they only laughed. One said threateningly, ‘Whit’re you grinning at me like that for? Ye look like a fuckin’ spastic.’ Frank blinked back tears. ‘Are you crying, ye wee sissy?’ Other boys looked at him with disgusted contempt. Very quickly, word went round the school that there was a new kid in the bug-huts who was a softy, who’d been seen crying. To make it worse he was Edgar Muncaster’s brother. How could someone like Ed Muncaster have a wee runt like that for a brother? It was letting the school down.
Frank’s life became a misery. Boys would surround him in the playground and start shouting and jeering at him, poking fun at his thinness, his large ears, his strange spastic grin and his tears. At first, terrified, he would stand in the middle of the circle and scream and shout at them to leave him alone. That only made things worse and after a while Frank realized he must keep quiet, not weep, show no emotion at all.
Once, and only once, Frank lost his temper. There was a day boy called Lumsden in his form. He was large and fat and wore glasses, and could have been bullied himself had he not been smart enough to adopt a confident swagger and make an asset of his size. He soon became the leader of Frank’s tormentors. One cold autumn day, the first frosts already whitening the tough grass on the treeless hillside, a gang of boys had gathered round Frank at morning break, trying to make him cry. He stood in the middle of them, unmoving. Then Lumsden stepped forward and dropped into a sort of crouch, swinging his arms to and fro, a grin on his face that Frank realized was an imitation of his own habitual grimace. ‘Wooo wooo wooo,’ Lumsden went, making monkey noises. ‘Muncaster’s like a chimp I saw at the zoo in the holidays, they grin like that all the time. Monkey Muncaster, Monkey Muncaster.’