As he climbs the rickety stairs to bed, he gives another thanks for the absence of a mirror. He isn’t sure he could look himself in the eye.
16
Tuesday, October 28, 1988
Silver Birch Academy, Wasdale Valley
2.20pm
Violet stands at the water’s edge. She feels empty. Weightless. Her whole being seems insubstantial, as if it is resolve alone that stops her from disintegrating into protons and particles to be disseminated by the breeze. She considers this. Thinks of spores and bees. Decides she would like to be a part of a swarm; a speck in a shared consciousness. Would like to become nothing more than energy; cosmic vapour wafting into and out of trees and stones and raindrops. A pleasing thought dances through her mind. Perhaps she could become a sensation. An impulse. She would like to become a moment of somebody else’s consciousness; her entire essence distilled into a stranger’s unbidden sense of joy. The picture makes her smile. She imagines herself as vapour, fleetingly inhaled. Mr Sixpence will be pleased that she was paying attention as he spoke, so softly, about the lower world; about what lay beyond the veil.
The thought saddens her. They say that he’s moved on. They say that he’s been hurt. Elora says he’s gone down into the dark world beyond our own and now exists entirely as energy, but Elora has a tendency to talk in riddles and bollocks. Either way, she’ll miss him. He always tolerated her without it seeming like an effort. And he was interesting. Saw things in her that nobody else saw.
“You’re the one they call Ultra, yes?”
Violet turns away from the great mirrored bowl of the lake. Looks back up towards the school. It’s a view she knows well, and today, with the soft rain drifting in from the east, the old building looks almost ghostly as it peers out from the ragged fringe of trees. Violet’s 12 now but looks older. She’s tall and well-proportioned; her eyes bright, her smile ever so slightly disdainful in its half-hearted curl. She’s womanish in her baggy, pyjama-like top and trousers, her hair pulled back into a ponytail that exposes an elegant neck. .
“Ultra, yes? That can’t be right, can it? Here, love, help me out ….”
Violet looks away from the water and into the unreadable face of a woman who appears to be modelled after a fertility icon: an earth mother baked in clay. She’s small and smooth-edged, a sketch composed entirely ovals and curves and circles. She’s dressed in a suede bolero jacket, unzipped, which exposes an inflatable mattress of belly-fat beneath her cream, cable-knit jumper. Her glasses are the same slightly ovoid shape as the face on which they sit – poorly maintained brown hair piled atop her head like shaving foam upon a palm. There’s something about her face that makes Violet think of goblins. Her eyes are sunken and her cheeks seem to stick out too far as she talks, making her glasses twitch up and down almost of their own volition.
“It’s Violet,” she corrects her, stepping forward and putting out a hand to be shaken. The little woman seems to appreciate the gesture. Her hand in Violet’s is plump and warm, the nails bitten down and ringless.
“And you get ‘Ultra’ from ultra-violet, yes?” asks the woman, one cheek twitching with a strange, lopsided smile. “Could be worse. I’m Eve. Evelyn, to be precise. I’m a Detective Sergeant, and I’m a bit lost. Do you think you might be able to spare me a moment or two?”
Behind her back, Violet makes fists. “Me? Yes, yes, of course. Um. Where you going?”
“Right now, nowhere. Bit steep that walk, innit? Thought I’d join you here for bit of a skive.”
“A skive?”
“Bunking off. Truanting. Twagging, as they say in Yorkshire. I’m supposed to be taking statements but I’ve got two decent constables who can do the job for me, which means I get the chance to go stare at the view and hope that the clouds shift.”
Violet can’t seem to make herself smile. She’s agitated. Twitchy. She tries to concentrate on her breathing but the imp in her chest won’t let her be still. She feels hyper: revved up, as if about to run a race or jump from a too-high branch. She’s known since yesterday morning that there would be questions – people in uniforms with notepads and serious faces, wanting her to be as helpful as she can be.
“You know why we’re here?” asks Eve, her hands in the pockets of her coat. She looks clammy, despite the cold of the day.
“Mr Sixpence?”
Eve nods, satisfied with the answer. Behind her, she can see two tall figures, blue as the hydrangeas in the conservatory up at the dorm. She can make out the distant figures of Mr Tunstall and Mr Rideal, busy noising around the two police officers like sheep at feeding time. Violet can imagine the differing ways in which the school’s two most senior figures are dealing with the disruption to the usual school day. Can picture Mr Tunstall, calm and orderly, insisting that there is nothing to be alarmed about: voice smooth as molasses. Rideal will be squirming. Rubbing those big pale hands together, steepling his pale, pointed fingers, slicking back his brilliantine black hair to better pronounce the sharp widow’s peak. He looks like the oil paintings in the Library. Looks just like the men in his family who came before – who owned this chunk of the valley and who called themselves ‘squire’. There are issues between the two of them – arguments about the direction the school is heading in; about whether to expand, to formalise the Silver Birch philosophy; to turn the neighbouring accommodation building into another wing of the school and to apply for permission to build new dormitories for an increased catchment.
“Heck of a name,” smiles Eve.
“Apparently it wasn’t always his name,” confides Violet, quietly. “I heard he used to be something important but he gave all that up to live in his bus and catch squirrels and talk about weird stuff. He knows a lot about crystals. He’s interesting.”
Eve pauses, appearing to be trying to work something free from a back molar with her tongue. She pushes a small, stubby finger behind her spectacles and wipes the glass.
“You know Mr Sixpence well?” she asks, when she’s finished.
“Nobody knows him that well,” says Violet, honestly. “He gives assemblies sometimes and if one of the regular teachers is ill he’ll come and monitor but we tend to see him more when we’re in the grounds. He looks after things. He talks to you if he sees you or if you ask him something. Some people are a bit mean about him, but I’m not. Honest.”
“Mr Rideal hasn’t been able to tell me very much about his actual duties,” says Eve. “Did I understand correctly – he’s like a sort of guidance counsellor here too? Is that right? I don’t know the phrase.”
“He’s just Mr Sixpence,” says Violet and she becomes aware of an unpleasant, prickling sensation in the air. “I think he makes drums when he’s not doing other stuff. I’ve seen him stretching skins out on this circular frame outside his bus. He kills rabbits with a slingshot. Do you know what a slingshot is? He’s really good with it, apparently. I don’t think he likes killing things though. He looks a bit sad, sometimes. Maybe not. Um …,”
“Going to be a storm,” says Eve, looking up. She licks a finger and holds it up. “You can feel it, I bet. Hair like that, I can imagine it standing on like you’ve rubbed it with a balloon. Always gets me in my fillings. Sizzles, like sausages in a pan. One of my first jobs as a copper was guarding the body of a poor roofer who’d been hit by lightning. There was still smoke coming out of his ears and the leather around his steel-toed boots has peeled back like skin.”