CHILD'S PLAY
Eustace
1
The door to the corridor was closed, but a soft light from out there flowed through the tilted fanlight, displaying, in a puzzle of shadow and highlights like a landscape on the moon, the bodies of the sleeping children, some crouched knee to chin in the centre of the bed, some spread-eagled face downwards with a footsole extended into the dark, others again laid out straight with their toes to the ceiling, the sheet rucked under their chin and their breath lightly coming and going. There were ten children in the dormitory, all girls. The room was full of their breathing and the faint scent of frangipani from the garden below.
All this, glimpsed from the washroom door, was like something the youth had never seen before.
Even after his eyes had grown accustomed to the half-darkness he found it difficult to interpret details. Was it a pillow one of the children was clasping to her, or another body? Was that a shadow or the dark strands of her hair? Was it an arm or a leg whose rounded flesh the light fell upon and made luminous? Piecing the ten bodies together as his gaze travelled from bed to bed, disentangling shadow from substance, smoothing out the creases in sheets and nightdresses to discover limbs, all this took long minutes in which he simply stood perfectly still and stared.
Then there were the sounds. Locating each of them — the murmurs words, the long slow outpourings of breath — and tracking them to an individual child so that he had each of them, each of the ten, clearly in mind; separating out the ticking of a clock, insect-noises from the park, and the dripping — was it? — of a tap in the washroom behind him, or a shower, or a cistern, together with his own breathing and the beating of his blood — it was a task to be carried out methodically and with great patience, but at some lower level than the part of him that simply observed. Something was thinking for him; that is how he might have put it. As when, with a speed and assurance that would have astonished the casual observer, he would lay out, on a sheet of newspaper he could barely read, all the working parts of a machine. Machines were the most complicated things he knew: more complicated than people— though of course he had only himself to judge by — and more reliable as well. Machines he was utterly at home with. Things fitted together part by part according to a settled order, and all the parts were congruent, screw and nut to bolthole, thread to thread. His long fingers could solve any problem of that sort in minutes, no trouble at all. His intelligence was all in his fingertips, and in his eyes.
One of the children began to mutter words out of a dream and the sounds caught his attention. He could make nothing of them. But the idea of a dream breaking into the room like that, the idea of its lying submerged under the silence (which wasn't really silence at all) and breaking surface in those unintelligible syllables, disturbed him; it introduced an unmanageable element. He took a small step forward.
It was a child in the second bed from the end. On the right. Who now turned in her sleep, changing not only her own position but all the highlights and shadows in the room, breaking his grasp of it. The dream had started a ripple that involved all the other sleepers as well. One by one they translated it, more or less according to the depth of their sleep, into stirrings, murmurs, little groans, till the whole room at the level of the beds was a shifting surface of light and dark, of rising and falling contours. He was almost sick with the unsteadiness of it. Everything was out of hand.
He turned back into the dark of the washroom with its row of hand-basins and its dripping cistern or shower, sat on the tiled floor, and began to haul on his boots, which he had been holding in his right hand, first the one, then the other; carefully knotting the laces. While he was still engaged in this the crack of light on the wall opposite began to widen, a shadow filled it, and when he jerked his head around, one of the children was there, standing barefoot in her nightdress, through which he could see the darker outline of the body.
She stood and rubbed her eyes, frowning. She must have been nine or ten years old. She stared and frowned, but didn't seem at all alarmed.
“Hullo,” he said huskily, because he couldn't think of anything else, and because the word, being the ordinary one, seemed immediately right. He gave a nervous smile.
She considered him a moment, then turned away as if he might be merely illusory and went to one of the washbasins.
He got shakily to his feet, suddenly too tall and thin, feeling out of his element in this big empty room with its checkerboard tiles, its row of handbasins and mirrors, its cubicles at the darker end where something dripped. He stood with his back to the door in case she panicked and tried to pass him. She was bent over a basin, drinking from the tap. Then she turned, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, and considered him again, her brows drawn together in childish puzzlement. He lost his head. “Look, you won't tell anyone, will you?” he stammered.
She grew thoughtful but said nothing, and he began to move towards the window.
“It's a secret,” he said.
She continued to watch. She seemed puzzled rather than afraid.
Fearful that if he took his eyes off her for even a second she might break or cry out, he felt his way to the sill, swung a leg over, eased himself down till only his fingertips clutched the cracked paintwork, and dropped. Once safely on the ground he moved swiftly into the shadow of a tree, but did not move away. Something made him stand there, still in the half-darkness, and look up. The garden trembled all about him on tiny waves of sound that might have been wings.
The child had come to the sill, her nightdress billowing a little in the breeze. She stood there, quite calmly, looking down at him. Then she did a strange thing. She raised her right hand briefly and waved.
2
She told no one.
Waking as usual in the narrow bed, with Miss Ivers in the doorway briskly clapping her hands and calling, "Now children, now girls!" and the room already filled with groans, giggles, little shrieks, as the nine others in their different ways took on the new day, sat dangling their feet over the edge of the bed a moment, unwilling to kick off, or wandered about half asleep till the first water struck them, exuberantly teased, slapped at sheets and punished pillows, or brushed their hair with long strokes, counting, or practised whatever rituals they had need of to make the crossing from the deep privacies of sleep to this lighter, brighter world that was embodied in Miss Ivers standing straight and slim in the doorway, the exclamation mark of her body making its own clear point: "This, girls, is how we should bear ourselves in the face of Monday morning,” the clapping of her hands, and “Now girls,” providing the first little hook on which they would hang the many wandering minutes of their day — waking as usual into this utterly orderly disorderly world, she thought she must have dreamed him, the boy in the washroom, he seemed so alien to it all; she put him away with her other dreams as she swung out of bed and drew on her slippers.
But no. In the act of reaching down to ease her finger under the right heel, she saw again the laces drawn tight over his index finger, the freckles on the back of his hand, and knew he was real. Though surrounded still by the soft unreality of her sleep, so that he existed in the continuation of whatever she had been dreaming just before, he had been, none the less, utterly bulky and solid — bare-legged, gangling, freckled, with a smell, a mixture of sweat and car-grease, that did not belong to dreams. Dreams were odourless, she knew that at least. Moving with the others into the washroom she couldn't believe that they too would not catch some trace of his presence, feel some displacement he had made in the ordinariness of the room, with its mirrors above white basins, its shower and toilet cubicles. But the others were washing noisily. They caught no scent of him in their boisterous, not-quite-female world.