I wasn’t afraid of him. I had been once; but you can get used to anything in time, you know, and nowadays I paid as little attention to his rages as the inhabitants of Pompeü to the volcano that was one day to extinguish them. Most things, repeated often enough, can become routine; and mine was simply to lock the bedroom door, whatever came, and to keep well out of his way the morning after.
At first Pepsi tried to get me on her side. Sometimes she would bring me little presents, or try to make dinner, though she wasn’t a great cook. But I remained stubbornly aloof. It wasn’t that I disliked her—with her false nails and overplucked eyebrows, I considered her too stupid to dislike—or even that I resented her. No, it was her dreadful palliness which offended me; the implication that she and I could have something in common, that one day perhaps, we could be friends.
It was at this point that St. Oswald’s became my playground. It was still officially out of bounds, but by then my father had begun to lose his initial evangelism for the place, and he was happy to turn a blind eye to my occasional infringement of the rules, as long as I was discreet and drew no attention to myself.
Even so, as far as John Snyde was concerned, I only ever played in the grounds. But the Porter’s keys were carefully labeled, each in its place in the glass box behind the gatehouse door, and as my curiosity and my obsession grew I found it harder and harder to resist the challenge.
One small theft, and the school was mine. Now no door was closed to me; passkey in hand, I roamed the deserted buildings while my father watched TV, or went down the local with his mates. As a result, by my tenth birthday I knew the school better than any pupil, and I was able to pass—invisible and unheard—without so much as raising dust.
I knew the cupboards where the cleaning equipment was kept; the medical room; the electrical points; the Archives. I knew all the classrooms; the south-facing geography rooms, unbearably hot in summer; the cool, paneled science rooms; the creaking stairs; the odd-shaped rooms in the Bell Tower. I knew the pigeon loft, the Chapel, the Observatory with its round glass ceiling, the tiny studies with their rows of metal cabinets. I read ghost phrases from half-cleaned blackboards. I knew the staff—at least by reputation. I opened lockers with the master key. I smelled chalk and leather and cooking and wood polish. I tried on discarded games kit. I read forbidden books.
Better still, and more dangerous, I explored the roof. St. Oswald’s roof was a huge, sprawling thing, ridged like a brontosaurus in stony overlapping plates. It was a small city in itself, with towers and quads of its own that mirrored the towers and quads of the school below. Great chimneys, imperially crowned, soared above the crooked ridges; birds nested; rogue elders sank their roots into damp crevices and flourished improbably, dripping blossom into the cracks between the slates. There were channels and gullies and monkey-puzzle ledges leading over the rooftops; there were skylights and balconies, perilously accessible from high parapets.
At first I was cautious, remembering my clumsiness in school gymnastics. But left to my own devices I gained in confidence; learned balance; taught myself to scramble silently over smooth slates and exposed girders; learned how to use a metal rail to vault from a high ledge onto a small balcony, and there down a thick, hairy elbow of creeper into a sallow-throated chimney of ivy and moss.
I loved the roof. I loved its peppery smell; its dankness in wet weather; the rosettes of yellow lichen that bloomed and spread across the stones. Here, at last, I was free to be myself. There were maintenance ladders leading out from various openings, but these were mostly in poor condition, some of them reduced to a lethal filigree of rust and metal, and I’d always scorned them, finding my own entrances to the rooftop kingdom, unblocking windows that had been painted shut decades before, looping pieces of rope around chimney stacks to aid ascent, exploring the wells and crawl spaces and the great leaded stone gutters. I had no fear of heights or falling. I found to my surprise that I was naturally agile; on the roof my light build was a real advantage, and up here there were no bullies to mock my skinny legs.
Of course I had long known that maintaining the roof was a job my father detested. He could just about cope with a broken slate (as long as it was accessible from a window), but the leadwork that sealed the gutters was quite another matter. To reach that, it was necessary to crawl down a slated incline toward the far edge of the roof, where there was a stone parapet that circled the gutter, and from there, to kneel, with three hundred feet of blue-green St. Oswald’s air between himself and the ground, to check the seal. He never did this necessary duty; gave a multitude of reasons for failing to do so, but after the excuses had run dry I finally, gleefully guessed the truth. John Snyde was afraid of heights.
Already, you see, secrets fascinated me. A bottle of sherry at the back of a stock cupboard, a packet of letters in a tin box behind a panel, some magazines in a locked filing cabinet, a list of names in an old accounts book. For me, no secret was mundane; no titbit too small to escape my interest. I knew who was cheating on his wife; who suffered from nerves; who was ambitious; who read romantic novels; who used the photocopier illicitly. If knowledge is power, I owned the place.
By then I was in my last term at Abbey Road Juniors. It had not been a success. I had worked hard, kept out of trouble, but had consistently failed to make any friends. In an effort to combat my father’s northern vowels I had tried—disastrously—to imitate the voices and mannerisms of the St. Oswald’s boys, thereby earning myself the nickname “Snobby Snyde.” Even some of the teachers used it; I’d heard them in their staff room, the heavy door swinging open into a fug of smoke and laughter. Snobby Snyde, pealed a woman’s voice. Oh, that’s priceless. Snobby Snyde.
I had no illusions that Sunnybank Park would be any better. Most of its intake was from the Abbey Road Estate, a depressing block of pebble-dashed council houses and cardboard flatblocks with washing at the balconies and dark stairwells that smelled of piss. I’d lived there myself. I knew what to expect. There was a sandbox filled with nuggets of dog shit; a playground with swings and a lethal scattering of broken glass; walls of graffiti; gangs of boys and girls with foul mouths and grubby, inbred faces.
Their fathers drank with my father down by the Engineers; their mothers had gone with Sharon Snyde to Cinderella’s Dance-a-rama on Saturday nights. “You want to make an effort, kid,” my father told me. “Give ’em a chance, and you’ll soon fit in.”
But I didn’t want to make the effort. I didn’t want to fit in at Sunnybank Park.
“Then what do you want?”
Ah. That was the question.
Alone in the echoing corridors of the school, I dreamed of having my name on the Honors Boards, of sharing jokes with the St. Oswald’s boys, of learning Latin and Greek instead of woodwork and technical drawing, of doing prep instead of homework at the big wooden desks. In eighteen months, my invisibility had changed from a talent to a curse; I longed to be seen; I strove to belong; I went out of my way to take ever greater risks in the hope that one day, perhaps, St. Oswald’s would recognize me and take me home.