Instead I stole from shops. To Leon I pretended that I did it for fun; we had record-stealing competitions and divided the loot between us in our “clubhouse” in the woods behind the school. I proved unexpectedly good at the game, but Leon was a natural; totally unafraid, he adapted a long coat especially for the purpose, slipping records and CDs into large pockets in the lining until he could hardly walk with their combined weight. Once, we were very nearly caught; just as we came to the doorway the lining of Leon’s coat split, spilling records and their sleeves everywhere. The girl at the checkout gaped at us; customers stared open-mouthed; even the store detective seemed paralyzed with astonishment. I was ready to run; but Leon just smiled apologetically, picked up his records with care, and only then bolted for it, the wings of his coat flapping out behind him as he ran. It was a long time before I dared visit the shop again—though we did eventually, at Leon’s insistence—but, as he said, we’d brought most of it with us anyway.
It’s a question of attitude. Leon taught me that, though if he’d known of my imposture I suspect even he would have conceded my superiority at the game. That was impossible, however. To Leon, most people counted as “banal.” Sunnybankers were “rabble”; and the people who lived on the council estates (including the flats on Abbey Road, where my parents and I had once lived) were “pram-faces,” “slappers,” “toerags,” and “proles.”
Of course, I shared his contempt; but if anything my hatred ran deeper. I knew things that Leon, with his nice house and his Latin and his electric guitar, could not possibly know. Our friendship was not a friendship of equals. The world we had made between us would not support any child of John and Sharon Snyde.
It was my only regret that the game could not last forever. But at twelve one does not think often of the future, and if there were dark clouds on my horizon, I was still too dazzled by my new friendship to notice them.
5
Wednesday, 15th September
There was a drawing tacked to my form notice board when I came in after yesterday’s lunch; a crude caricature of myself sporting a Hitler mustache and a speech bubble saying Juden raus!
Anyone could have placed it there—some member of Devine’s set, who were in after break, or one of Meek’s geographers, even a duty prefect with a warped sense of humor—but I knew it was Knight. I could tell from the smug, bland look on his face, from the way he never met my eye, from the small delay between his yes and his sir—an impertinence only I observed.
I removed the picture, of course, and crumpled it into the wastebasket without even seeming to look at it, but I could smell the insurrection. Otherwise, all is calm, but I have been here too many years to be fooled; this is only the specious calm of the epicenter; the crisis is yet to come.
I never did find out who saw me in the locker room. It might have been anyone with an axe to grind; Geoff and Penny Nation are both the type, always reporting “procedural anomalies” in that pious way that hides their real malice. I’m teaching their son this year, as it happens—a clever, colorless first-year boy—and ever since the set lists were printed they have paid an unhealthy amount of attention to my methods in class. Or it might have been Isabelle Tapi, who has never liked me, or Meek, who has his reasons—or even one of the boys.
Not that it matters, of course. But since the first day back I’ve had the feeling that someone was watching me, closely and without kindness. I imagine Caesar must have felt the same when the Ides of March came around.
In the classroom, business as usual. A first-year Latin group, still fatally under the impression that a verb is a “doing word”; a sixth-form group of no-more-than-average students, plowing their well-meaning way through Aeneid IX; my own 3S, struggling with the gerund (for the third time) between smart comments from Sutcliff and Allen-Jones (irrepressible, as ever) and more ponderous observations from Anderton-Pullitt, who considers Latin a waste of time better spent on the study of First World War aircraft.
No one looked at Knight, who got on with his work without a word, and the little test I gave them at the end of the lesson satisfied me that most of them were now as comfortable with the gerund as any third-year can reasonably expect to be. As a bonus to his main test, Sutcliff had added a number of impertinent little drawings, showing “species of gerund in their natural habitat” and “what happens when a gerund meets a gerundive.” I must remember to talk to Sutcliff someday. Meanwhile the drawings are Sello-taped onto the lid of my desk, a small, cheery antidote to this morning’s mystery caricaturist.
In the department, there is good and bad. Dianne Dare seems to be shaping up nicely, which is just as well, as Pearman is at his least efficient. It isn’t altogether his fault—I have a soft spot for Pearman, in spite of his lack of organization; the man has a brain, after all—but in the wake of the new appointment, Scoones is becoming a thorough nuisance, baiting and backbiting to such an extent that the quiet Pearman is perpetually on the verge of losing his temper, and even Kitty has lost some of her sparkle. Only Tapi seems unaffected; perhaps as a result of her burgeoning intimacy with the obnoxious Light, with whom she has been seen on numerous occasions in the Thirsty Scholar, as well as sharing a telltale sandwich in the school Refectory.
The Germans, on the other hand, are enjoying their spell of supremacy. Much good may it do them. The mice may have gone—victims of Dr. Devine’s Health and Safety regulations—but Straitley’s ghost endures, rattling his chains at the inmates and causing occasional mayhem.
For the price of a drink in the Scholar I have acquired a key to the new German office, into which I now retire every time Devine has a House Meeting. It’s only ten minutes, I know, but in that time I usually find that I can cause enough inadvertent disorder—coffee cups on the desk, phone out of alignment, crosswords completed in Sourgrape’s personal copy of the Times—to remind them of my continued presence.
My filing cabinets have been annexed to the nearby Book Room—this also troubles Dr. Devine, who was until recently unaware of the existence of the door that divides the two rooms, and which I have now reinstated. He can smell my cigarette smoke from his desk, he says, and invokes Health and Safety with an expression of pious self-satisfaction; so many books must surely present a fire hazard, he protests, and speaks of installing a smoke detector.
Fortunately, Bob Strange—who in his capacity as Third Master oversees all departmental spending—has made it clear that until the inspection is over there must be no more unnecessary expenditure, and Sourgrape is forced to endure my presence for the moment, whilst no doubt planning his next move.
Meanwhile, the Head continues his offensive on socks. Monday’s assembly was entirely constructed around the subject, with the result that since then, virtually all the boys in my form have taken to wearing their most controversial socks to school—with, in some cases, the additional extravagance of a pair of brightly colored sock suspenders.
So far I have counted: one Bugs Bunny, three Bart Simpsons, a South Park, four Beavis and Butt-Heads, and, from Allen-Jones, a shocking-pink pair with the Powerpuff Girls embroidered on them in sequins. It’s fortunate, then, that my eyes aren’t as good as they once were, and that I never notice that kind of thing.