Blood Bonds: A psychological thriller (5 page)

Connie had a simple philosophy towards life that enraptured me. I never saw anyone laugh so heartily at a comedy film on television, shrill machinegun titters till the tears ran down her painted cheeks. It was the same with a book – and she loved to read, though nothing highbrow – and she’d tut-tut or verbally abuse the hero, or sigh, or chuckle; “You can’t do that, you silly bugger!” she’d exclaim, or, “Don’t trust him, he’s married!” The radio was rarely silent. Her loud voice would sing in accompaniment, tunelessly unfortunately, whether it was The Beatles or Brahms. And dance! Encouraged by a piece on the radio, I saw her many a time take Max by the hands and launch into impromptu wild gyrations, twisting, spinning, kicking her legs till both mother and son collapsed onto the sofa breathless and laughing and in total disarray. By comparison I once saw my mother dance ‘The Last Waltz’ with my father at a cousin’s dreary wedding do, thinking them exceedingly daring. And you
never
bounced on our sofa for fear of death.

I guess it was a magical time. I stepped over the threshold of the Stone house and inhibitions seemed to be washed away. It was like entering another dimension, an oasis of difference in a universe of similitude, where I fondly lapped at the water of freedom for the first time in my young life. I was privileged; one of the few people actually allowed to be sucked into their world, allowed to linger and take part in it. She started to call me first ‘Filly’ for Philip, and then shortened Calder to ‘Collie’, which for some reason she thought very funny. And so it stuck. I was never referred to as Philip by them again, only Collie. I didn’t mind; I was fully accepted.

As I said, magical. It was all so
magical
. Of course, looking back now, it wasn’t so out of the ordinary, but at the time appeared so to my young mind. My sweetest childhood memories are all satellites revolving around that particular moment in time. It was the end of summer, the school holidays drawing achingly to a close. The future lay warm and colourful on some far distant horizon. It was a time when the senses play more part in living than ever it would as an adult.

It is sharp still. The picture of Connie sitting in her deckchair outside on the grass; the radio blaring out some pop song or other, her bare foot tapping out a rhythm, hands clasped around a paperback, eyes riveted onto the page, one hand snaking out to grab a chocolate from a box by her side, delivering it to her mouth without even a blink. And Max and I, on the grass also, playing not far from her with one of his many toys, lost in our own separate world of spacemen, aliens, cowboys and Indians, Batman and Robin, Thunderbirds and Stingray.
Magical.

“Happy, Collie?” she asked me on one such day. Why she did so I don’t know.

I nodded feverishly. “Very!” I said.

She went back to her book, smiling.

It would all end, of course.

Drain away like sand through fingers.

*  *  *  *

“What’s wrong?” I whispered under my breath.

Max was staring at the blackboard. Mr Walton had filled it entirely with maths questions, as he had done every Monday morning for decades. Line after line of pounds, shillings and pence to add up, take away or times – and not forgetting those guineas that always used to cause me such consternation. Decimalisation was still a year away, and Mr Walton was adamant that it would either prove too ‘foreign’ or too much of a switch for people to make after all these centuries and therefore it was necessary that the old system be kept as a tried and trusted backup, whether we approved or not.

Max was visibly trembling. I asked him again what was wrong.

“Can’t do it,” he said firmly, brows lowered, his pencil lying redundant on his desk, the paper on which he was supposed to be writing as bare as Mr Walton’s head.

Walton’s wrath was legendary. I was concerned for my new friend. Being the same age as me, Max was in the same class. All boys, too, this being a year or so before they mixed classes with girls. As this was the first day back at school, and Mr Walton not yet having had the necessary information he needed to grade us according to intellect – bright boys to the front, dunces at the back, a grading arrived at, it must be said, by no immediately recognised qualification process other than that which originated somewhere in Walton’s head – Max and I managed to sit next to each other. Even I, as bad as I was with maths, had some attempt at answering this mathematical barrage down on paper. Max, apparently, had given up. This didn’t auger too well for his first day at a new school, especially with Mr Walton at the helm.

The burly teacher, his grey tweed jacket looking too small for him and pinching his fat arms, sat behind his high wooden desk and buried his attention in an important looking pile of paper before him. Silence descended like a mighty hand, squeezing us into hard concentration.

“Try,” I urged Max. “Do the simple ones.”

He looked at the board, squinting. “Which ones are the simple ones?” he said, shrugging.

Walton’s head sprang up, eyes darting this way and that. He settled them on Max, who must have been the only boy amongst us who sat without a pencil in his hand. He was quick to spot it. He then rose slowly, like some grotesque leviathan rising from the deep, till his huge body remained fixed and rock-like, looming above his oak desk.

“Problem?” Walton said, his voice like peals of thunder in the silent room. He put his hands behind his back and sauntered down the line of desks towards Max. He paused, craned his neck forward, slowly picked up Max’s piece of paper, turned it over enquiringly, and then placed it back on the desk. He took the pencil in his massive fingers and thrust it into Max’s hand, tiny by comparison. “Maxwell isn’t it?” he said.

“Max,” he returned quickly.

“Max,
sir
,” said Walton.

“Max,
sir
,” echoed Max.

“You can start now, Max, if you please,” Walton said evenly, stabbing at the paper with his forefinger; it skidded across the glossy surface of the desk. With that he ambled back to his desk and thumped onto his seat again.

For long agonising minutes I was aware of Max struggling to make sense of the numbers on the blackboard. I could sense the panic welling within him. In the end he simply gave up with a grunt of exasperation and put the pencil back down, pushing both pen and paper away from him. He sat with arms folded, staring at Walton, who stared straight back. There was a tension in the classroom, everyone testified to it afterwards, for even though all eyes were supposedly on their own work, the focus of all interest was on Max. Here, then, might be marked the genesis of Max’s extraordinary status within the junior school, which he was to build upon later in secondary.

This time Walton’s movements were lithe and swift, a beast springing to the kill. He reached Max’s desk in no time at all. Those closest to him bent away from him as if they were tall grass stems pushed by a strong wind. “What’re you doing?” he yelled.

I suppose the era must be taken into consideration here. That and the generally poor quality of pupils that passed through the school and the consequently low expectations teachers had of us all. Walton, like more than a few teachers there, had taught in the 30s; they had brought the 30s along with them right into the late 60s, and would drag those same 30s kicking and screaming into the 70s, regardless of governments and any number of newer, younger, sociologically aware socialist upstarts – new teachers, that is.

So it was no surprise to us that Walton yelled. He was renowned for it. A deep, booming bellow that caused your ear to ring for minutes afterwards. I imagined Max’s ear to be ringing with a not too pleasant sound right now.

“Pick up that pencil now!” he yelled again.

Max made as if to, then refolded his arms. “I can’t,” he said.

“What do you mean, you can’t? Course you can. And will. Pick it up!”

Max remained fixed.

I swore I felt the tension squeak as if ready to snap.

“Are you deliberately being defiant, lad?” In all fairness, Walton did
try
to counter his often hair-trigger temper. This last phrase was spoken in a voice upon which a veneer of calm had been noticeably glued. But the sight of this youngster with his arms so obviously folded in insubordination, meant the voice rapidly splintered this thin and ineffectual overcoat of calm. He bellowed something incomprehensible, dragged Max out of his seat by his arm, thrust him into the aisle between the desks and marched him to the front of the class with a fist in his back every few steps. By the time they reached the blackboard, both faces, man and boy, were ruby-red. And all other faces had abandoned their work and were mesmerised by the proceedings.

Walton grabbed Max by the shoulders, spun him round to face the blackboard and told him not to move an inch. “Stay there until you learn some manners. Obviously they let you do this sort of thing where you come from, m’lad, but don’t expect any of that namby-pamby southern stuff to wash up here. I’m afraid you’re not going to get away with anything.”

He grunted, and flashed us a demonic stare, at which the class, as a single entity, bent its many heads and made a communal pretence of losing itself in its work. I saw Max’s shoulders heaving, and at first I thought he was crying. Then, calmly, almost leisurely, he took up the blackboard rubber that lay on the ledge of the blackboard, and began to erase the chalked maths questions; great swathes of it disappeared. Mr Walton had his head bent to the pile of paper on his desk, his chin cradled in his huge hands. I remember my mouth falling open and staying there. Other mouths joined mine, till all heads watched the incredible scene unfold. It was only when Walton finally registered that nobody was working, that he turned round to see Max putting down the rubber. He’d managed to completely wipe all Walton’s work away, apart from a narrow band of chalked numbers that remained at the top of the blackboard beyond his reach.

Walton, gasped, spluttered, rose from his desk, banged his knee, sank back onto his chair, braced himself by placing his hands on the desktop, and hauled himself up again. He exploded.

I’d read about Vesuvius in my book,
General Knowledge for Boys
. This was every bit as explosive as that.  Walton appeared to go off with a series of booms in quick succession, the retorts of his voice, amplified and reflected by the bare walls, filling the classroom. I had the urge to put my hands above my head to protect myself. Walton grabbed Max, who yelped in obvious pain, and then dragged the boy to his desk. Walton was grumbling and roaring, his face livid. Max was struggling as Walton reached behind his desk for his cane, a long, thin piece of bamboo – thin because he believed its speed and narrowness caused greater distress than the clumsy wide canes used by other teachers. Taking Max’s wrist in his iron, manacle-like grip, Walton brought the cane up high, Max heaving with all his might to break free. But the cane whipped swiftly down and smote the end of his fingertips; went up again, and down;
schwip-tif, shwip-tif, shwip-tif
it went as it zipped through the air and made unrelenting contact with Max’s hand. Max clenched his fist and the cane rapped against his knuckles, bringing blood. Walton released him and Max recoiled, clasping his hand and glowering at Walton; tears flooded his eyes, I could see them glinting in the light, and yet not one dropped. Max’s teeth and jaw were set.

Walton pointed the cane at Max. “You little…” He swallowed, trying to regain his breath. The stick wavered, as if it was a tongue trying to verbalise that which the teacher couldn’t.

If all our mouths were agog, then they fell even wider when Max rushed at the desk, grabbed a handful of Walton’s papers and tore them in half, throwing the bits into the air like confetti. He shrieked wildly and landed Mr Walton a well-aimed kick on the shin. Walton yelped, dropped the cane and clasped the point of impact crying, “You…You…You…”

“You’re going on my list!” Max screamed at the teacher, jabbing a finger at him.

Max tore from the classroom and across the grey but sunshine-washed playground. We all rose from our seats and craned our necks to catch sight of him running out of the gates, but not before hopping between the white hopscotch lines painted on the concrete. A murmur like the passing of a huge swarm of bees spread to stuff the room full of the sounds of childish awe.

*  *  *  *

My eyes hurt. It’s my cell. I must describe my cell. The colour of the walls causes me such distress. Cream, cream, cream. And there’s no respite. Not even a window to release my eyes from their own special kind of prison. They’re sentenced to an interminable sameness. The walls cast a ghastly, jaundiced pallor on everything within the room; my single table, my single chair; all are seeped in a thin kind of sickly juice. I find –

Something’s nagging me.

It hits me in the face like a slap. Have you ever had that - you know, when something clicks on and tells you you’re doing something that you shouldn’t? I’m staring at the paragraph I’ve written for what must be five whole minutes now.

So what’s wrong, I ask myself? What’s tickling your brain, huh?  I flipped back through what I’d already written, sifting through loose pages on my desk, re-reading, scanning the paragraphs, till I found, to my dismay, that I’d already described my cell to you.

It’s so disconcerting when that happens. It nudges me into thinking my brain is slowly dissolving and will in time be a putrid, runny pile of slop sitting in the base of my skull. It’s like a warning sign, this unexpected forgetfulness. So what’s important about forgetting such a little thing? Well it’s bloody important, if you knew me – I mean
really
knew me. This just isn’t like me at all; at least, it isn’t like the me that existed before. I never made mistakes like that.
Never
. So what’s going on?

I’m like a goddamn grub encased in a brick-lined cocoon, metamorphosing into God knows what. I’ve changed. And the frightening thing is I know
how
I’ve changed. I’m in a constant state of ugly, mentally wearing transformation. Is this what he wanted all along? Is that his plan? When I finally leave this prison – if I
ever
leave here – will I be so misshapen in mind and body that nobody will recognise me; that I won’t even recognise myself; that, in effect Philip Calder will have ceased to exist? And when this grotesque little grub finally emerges from his cocoon, what will he be then? Who will he be? What then for me?

*  *  *  *