“Bastards.”
The lights were green, but the queue ahead was too long to allow me to pass. A couple of boys saw the opportunity to cross—I recognized McNair, one of Straitley’s favorites, Jackson, the diminutive bully from the same form, and the sidling, crablike gait of Anderton-Pullitt—and just at that moment the traffic ahead of me began to move.
Jackson crossed at a run. So did McNair. There was a space of fifty yards ahead of me, into which, if I was quick, I could pass. Otherwise the lights would change again and I would have to stand at the junction for another five minutes as the interminable traffic crawled by. But Anderton-Pullitt did not run. A heavy boy, already middle-aged at thirteen, he crossed in leisurely fashion, not looking at me even when I honked my horn, as if by ignoring me he might will me out of existence. Briefcase in one hand, lunch box in the other, walking fastidiously around the puddle in the middle of the road so that by the time he was out of my way, the lights had changed and I was forced to wait.
Trivial, I know. But there’s an arrogance to it, a lazy contempt which is pure St. Oswald’s. I wondered what he would have done if I had simply driven at him—or over him, in fact. Would he have run? Or would he have stayed put, confident, stupid, mouthing to the last: You wouldn’t—you couldn’t—!
Unfortunately, there was no question of my running down Anderton-Pullitt. For a start, I need the car, and the rental company might get suspicious if I brought it back with a ruined front end. Still, there are plenty of other means, I thought, and I owed myself a little celebration. I smiled as I waited at the frozen lights, and turned the radio on.
I sat in room fifty-nine for the first half-hour of lunchtime. Thanks to Bob Strange, Straitley was out, either lurking in that Book Room of his, or patrolling the corridors on duty. The room was filled with boys. Some did their homework; some played chess or talked, occasionally chugging from cans of fizzy drink or eating crisps.
All teachers hate rainy days; there is nowhere for the pupils to go but indoors, and they have to be supervised; it is muddy, and accidents happen; it is crowded and noisy; squabbles turn into fights. I intervened in one myself, between Jackson and Brasenose (a soft, fat boy who has not yet learned the trick of making his size work for him), supervised the tidying of the room, pointed out a spelling mistake in Tayler’s homework, accepted a Polo mint from Pink and a peanut from Knight, chatted for a few minutes to the boys eating their packed lunches on the back row, then, my task accomplished, I made once again for the Quiet Room, to await developments over a cup of murky tea.
I do not, of course, have a form. None of the new staff has. It gives us free time and a broader perspective; I can watch from behind the lines, and I know the moments of weakness; the dangerous times; the unsupervised sections of the school; the vital minutes—the seconds—during which, if disaster were to strike, the giant’s underbelly would be at its most exposed.
The after-lunch bell is one of these. Afternoon registration has not yet begun, although at this point, lunchtime is officially over. In theory, it is a five-minute warning, a changeover time during which staff still sitting in the Common Room make a move toward their classrooms, and staff members on lunchtime duties have a few minutes to collect their belongings (and maybe glance at a newspaper) before registration.
In effect, however, it is a five-minute window of vulnerability in an otherwise smooth-running operation. No one is on duty; many staff—and sometimes pupils—are still moving from one place to another. Little surprise, then, that most mishaps occur at such a time; scuffles; thefts; petty vandalism; random pieces of misbehavior perpetrated in transit and under cover of the surge of activity that precedes the return to afternoon lessons. This is why it was five minutes before anyone really noticed that Anderton-Pullitt had collapsed.
It might have been less if he had been popular. But he was not: sitting slightly away from the others, eating his sandwiches (Marmite and cream cheese on wheat-free bread, always the same) with slow, laborious bites, he looked more like a tortoise than a thirteen-year-old boy. There is one of his kind in every year; precocious, bespectacled, hypochondriac, shunned even beyond bullying, he seems impervious to insults or rejection; cultivates an old man’s pedantic speech, which gives him a reputation for cleverness; is polite to teachers, which makes him a favorite.
Straitley finds him amusing—but then he would; as a boy, he was probably just the same. I find him annoying; in Straitley’s absence he follows me around when I’m on duty in the yard and subjects me to ponderous lectures on his various enthusiasms (science fiction, computers, First World War aircraft) and his ailments real and imagined (asthma, food intolerances, agoraphobia, allergies, anxiety, warts).
As I sat now in the Quiet Room, I amused myself in trying to determine from the sounds that came from above my head, whether or not Anderton-Pullitt had a genuine ailment.
No one else noticed; no one else was listening. Robbie Roach, who was free next period and has no form either (too many extracurricular commitments), was rootling through his locker. I noticed a pack of French cigarettes in there (a present from Fallow), which he quickly hid behind a pile of books. Isabelle Tapi, who teaches part-time and therefore has no form either, was drinking from a bottle of Evian water and reading a paperback.
I heard the five-minute bell followed by a hubbub; the unchained melody of unsupervised boys; the sound of something (a chair?) falling over. Then, raised voices—Jackson and Brasenose resuming their fight—another chair falling, then silence. I assumed Straitley had come in. Sure enough, there came the sound of his voice—a subdued murmur from the boys, then the domestic cadences of registration, familiar as those of the football scores on Saturday afternoons.
—Adamczyk?
Sir.
—Almond?
Sir.
—Allen-Jones?
Yes, sir.
—Anderton-Pullitt?
Beat.
—Anderton-Pullitt?
2
St. Oswald’s Grammar School for Boys
Wednesday, 29th September
Still no news from the Anderton-Pullitts. I take this as a good sign—I’m told that in extreme cases the reaction can prove fatal within seconds—but even so, the thought that one of my boys might have died—actually died—in my room, under my supervision—makes my heart stutter and my palms sweat.
In all my years of teaching, I have known three of my boys die. Their faces look out at me every day from the class photographs along the Middle Corridor: Hewitt, who died of meningitis in the Christmas holidays of 1972; and Constable, 1986, run over by a car in his own street as he ran to retrieve a lost football; and of course, Mitchell, 1989—Mitchell, whose case has never ceased to trouble me. All outside of school hours; and yet in every instance (but especially in his) I feel to blame, as if I should have been watching out for them.
Then there are the Old Boys. Jamestone, cancer at thirty-two; Deakin, brain tumor; Stanley, car crash; Poulson, killed himself, no one knows why, two years ago, leaving a wife and an eight-year-old Down syndrome daughter. Still my boys, all of them, and still I feel an emptiness and a grief when I think of them, mingled with that strange, aching inexplicable feeling that I should have been there.
I thought at first he was faking. Spirits were high; Jackson was fighting with someone in a corner; I was in a hurry. Perhaps he had been unconscious when I entered; precious seconds passed as I quietened the form; found my pen. Anaphylactic shock, they call it—heaven knows I’d heard enough about it from the boy himself, though I’d always assumed his ailments were more to do with his overprotective mother than his actual physical condition.