Sharpe thought this worse than unfair, not least because several boys had overheard, but restrained himself to saying “I hope so too.”
He was able to continue until early in his first lesson. He thought he’d snagged the imagination of some of the class with the concept of infinity until a phone burst into the theme from a television horror series. “I thought I’d switched it off,” Lomax said, less an apology than a complaint that Sharpe couldn’t help feeling was aimed at him, especially when the boy added with a fraction of a grin “It’s for you, sir.”
“Bring it to me.”
Once the boy had finished sauntering up to him Sharpe managed to turn the phone off before shutting it in his desk. “Aren’t you going to answer it, sir?” Lomax said.
“You may collect it from the office after school. Heads down to your work now. Silence. Heads down.”
Sharpe’s triumph was rather undermined by Miss Dodd, who looked wary of accepting a mobile from him when he detoured to the office on the way to his next class. He would have welcomed a mid-morning break and a longer one at lunchtime, but he was in charge of the yard. As he watched for misbehaviour and swooped to deal with miscreants, he kept being confused by the heat and his lack of sleep—kept glimpsing movements too large for a spider but otherwise as thin beyond the railings. Of course nothing was there whenever he gave in to the temptation to check.
Before lunchtime was over he knew he was the butt of a joke. In less than an hour three boys with mobiles told him they had a call for him. Their expressions were sullen or bewildered or both, which he put down to slyness if not to drugs. The first two exhausted his patience, and he sent the third to explain himself to the headmaster. Sharpe suspected that the hellish Ls were the instigators of the prank even before Latham’s mobile interrupted the elucidation of a theorem in the final lesson. “It was off,” Latham objected.
“Exactly like your friend’s, no doubt. Do tell us all who’s calling.”
“Dunno,” said Latham, having brought the rudimentary tune to an end. “It’s for you, though.”
“Unluckily for you I’ve heard that more than once too often. I’ll have the truth this time.”
“It is,” the boy protested with an aggrieved air. “Maybe it’s your dealer. My brother said—”
“All this tomfoolery was his idea, was it? I rather think if anybody’s dealer is calling it will be yours. Let me speak to them at once.”
“It’s not. They never call me. I’ve not got none.”
“Which means you have.” With an odd sense of sleepwalking Sharpe darted to wrench the phone from the boy’s grasp, only to be met by silence as flat as the earpiece. “Show me the number that rang,” he ordered.
Latham dealt a key a resentful poke and displayed a blank screen. “See, I didn’t know.”
“Go and convince the headmaster of that if you can. The rest of you, heads down.”
Should he have taken the boy to Mr Thorn? The class would have degenerated into chaos in his absence. Without order you had nothing, a point that Latham proved by not returning. Presumably he’d stolen home, unless he was meeting his dealer. The thought that Sharpe could be responsible for this lodged like hot ash behind his eyes. He was returning Lomax’s phone at the end of the lesson when a thirteen-year-old brought the message that Mr Thorn wanted Mr Sharpe in his office.
“Yes, head.”
“I’ve just had to deal with one of your boys.” As if the name might be written there, the headmaster frowned at the papers arranged on his desk before saying “Latham.”
“He did come to see you, then. We haven’t lost all control.”
“That may seem to be the question.” Mr Thorn lifted his gaze, which appeared to hope to see more than it did. “He says you accused him of buying drugs in class. I take it you’ve some proof.”
“I didn’t quite say that to him, but I certainly wouldn’t discount the possibility.”
“Best kept to yourself unless there’s evidence, Kenneth. And then he says you assaulted him.”
“Assaulted, good heavens, I think not.” Sharpe had a disconcerting sense of having dreamed the incident or of dreaming now. “I took a phone away from him,” he said. “Phones in class are still against the rules, I believe.”
“By force.”
“No more than necessary. Really none at all.”
“Would his classmates agree with you, do you think?” As Sharpe’s sense of injustice stopped up his words, Mr Thorn said “I’m hopeful that I’ve persuaded him to accept your apology on Monday, but it will depend on what his parents choose to do, his guardian, rather. Try and forget about it over the weekend and relax. If you’ll forgive my saying so, you seem a little drugged yourself.”
He maintained a guardedly sympathetic expression until Sharpe turned away in disgust. By the time Sharpe reached the door Mr Thorn was intent on his paperwork. “Head down,” Sharpe muttered, no longer caring if he was heard.
He was being sent home as a wrongdoer, was he? Let the school and the homework he had still to mark survive without him for a few days, then. He ignored all the boys and their activities, however villainous, as he made for the station. If intervening earned him more blame than the culprits, it wasn’t worth the risk.
A dog was grubbing among the rubbish in the middle of the passage beneath the railway. He heard its surreptitious feeble movements and saw the dull glint of its eyes, if those weren’t hypodermics it was shifting. He didn’t need to venture in to confirm how unpleasantly skinny it was.
The train felt like a refuge from it until he remembered he would be surrounded by phones. When he saw a man in the next carriage take a call and look around in quest of someone, Sharpe couldn’t help crouching out of view, however irrational that was. Surely the man wasn’t shouting after him as Sharpe hurried away from the train.
As soon as he was home he dashed into the front room to discover what the choked sound was. The battery must be low; the mobile wasn’t ringing so much as rattling. Even when he leaned on the cushion the ragged noise refused to be suffocated. When the cushion began to twitch as if the phone was struggling to reach him, he left the room and slammed the door.
He couldn’t eat much. He couldn’t concentrate on music or reading or even the news. It seemed impossible that he could hear the half-dead sound through both the cushion and the door, but wherever he was in the house, he did. Was lack of sleep inflaming his senses? When the words of a Victorian chapter grew as restless on the page as he heard the mobile was, he retreated to bed.
At last his ears gave up straining to listen for activity in the house. In the early hours he awoke and hastened downstairs to return the mobile where he’d found it. He used its glow to search the passage for the owner. It wasn’t she, however, who wobbled upright in the gloom, raising a face so withered it was featureless except possibly for eyes and parting tattered greenish lips to mouth “Give it back.” As some of a hand groped to catch hold of him he managed actually to waken. He wanted to think he was still asleep, because he heard a whisper somewhere near him.
He had to force himself to extend a hand into the dark. Once the light was on he identified the noise as the death rattle of the mobile. This wasn’t reassuring; it sounded far too like a sluggish almost formless repetition of the phrase from his dream. As he struggled to believe he was imagining the similarity, he heard a feeble thumping downstairs—a knocking on a door.
He kicked away the bedclothes and stumbled onto the landing. The sound was in the front room. Something was bumping weakly but persistently against the far side of the door. He ran downstairs and flung the door wide, sweeping the object backwards. At once it began to crawl towards him in the midst of a dim flickering greenish stain that was the only illumination in the room.
He’d had enough. The police could deal with its antics however they liked. He dashed upstairs to drag yesterday’s clothes on. Having picked up the mobile between finger and thumb, he dropped it in an outer pocket of his jacket and left the house. He mustn’t be fully awake. He was making for the local police station before he remembered it had been closed last year.