Different Class (28 page)

December 1981

Mousey was my bestest friend. (Mousey, you were my
only
friend.) We were both in Miss McDonald’s form at Netherton Green, and we did most things together. Mousey had a Condition, too – not like mine. It had a special name. I don’t remember it now, though. He was in the Slow Readers at school, but actually he could read just fine.

I liked Miss McDonald. I liked her a lot. She went to our Church, and sometimes, if we were good, she would play the guitar during Storytime. She used to wear a blue Indian-print dress with little bells stitched on the hem, and though she was old – twenty-five, at least – she was totally gorgeous. I was the classroom monitor. I wore a badge and everything. I used to bring the chalks from out of the stock cupboard every day, and sometimes I used to stand on a chair and wipe the board clean with the board-rubber. I also watered the plants, collected books, stuck gold stars on the star chart and looked after the class hamster.

Miss McDonald called me her ‘special little helper’. Mousey helped too, but only because I let him. Mousey was from the White City estate. He had two brothers, but no dad. My dad didn’t like him, because his mum didn’t go to Church, and because she was a cleaner. But Mousey was OK. We used to go to the graveyard down by old St Mary’s Church, and lie down on gravestones and play dead.

In the days before God took my brother, I’d never thought about death. Perhaps I was too young to get my head around that kind of thing. Or perhaps I was in that state of grace that Mr Speight keeps talking about. Of course my parents had mentioned it. They told me that you went to sleep, and then you woke up in Heaven. And for a while, I believed them. The way I believed in Santa Claus, and babies coming from cabbages. Grown-ups lie to kids all the time. The Tooth Fairy; the Virgin Birth; how the red stuff doesn’t sting and how the ice-cream van only plays music when they’ve run out of ice-cream. Kids are pretty stupid like that. They’ll believe almost anything.

And then, Bunny died, and suddenly, I was an only child again. Nothing else seemed to have changed. I still went to school; there was still TV, with
Play School
and
Scooby Doo
and
Looney Tunes
and
Doctor Who
. The sun still rose in the mornings. Bedtime was still at the same time. Everything went on as before, except that Bunny wasn’t there. His toys were still in his toy-box. His cot with its patchwork coverlet was still there, forever empty. It’s not that I cared about him much. But the thought that he could just be
gone
, while his toys and his cot were still around—

And it hit me.
Death is forever
. A hole in the ground. A headstone. People walking around on the grass above you, while you’re down there in the earth. Kids watching TV; playing football; doing their homework; growing up. Except that Bunny would never grow up. Bunny was gone forever. And if Bunny could die, then anyone could. Mum. Dad. Miss McDonald.
Me
. Unless I believed in Heaven, of course. And all that, forever, unless I
believed
.

And that was it, Mousey. I
didn’t
believe. I knew about Jesus, and Heaven, and Hell. I believed in them all, in the same way I believed in Santa and the Easter Bunny. But I believed in Death more. God was small. Death was huge. I used to lie in bed at night, trying to imagine it. All that
forever
, just waiting for me—

I told myself that I had at least sixty years before I really needed to think about it, but somehow sixty didn’t seem long, compared to all that eternity. I used to lie awake at night, paralysed by the numbers. Nothing – no one – could help me. Mum and Dad were too busy with arrangements, then too busy with praying and support groups to care much about what I was doing. I remember the long, whistling silences around the table at mealtimes; the way my mother looked at me; the whispers from the people at Church.

If I’d been the one who died, I thought, would my brother have understood? Or would I have just been a photograph in someone’s photo album, like Grandma and Grandpa, who died before I was even born, and who I always remembered in black and white, like an old film? I’d always known that people died. But the thought that
I
would, too – Mousey, I thought I’d go crazy. And then, you taught me to play The Game, and everything changed for both of us.

Now I was friends with Mousey at school, but I wasn’t supposed to play with him. Dad was very strict about that. White City boys were a different class. They didn’t even go to Church. Mousey came to our house just once, when I was new at Netherton Green. We played trains in my bedroom. Mum made oatmeal biscuits. Dad looked in a couple of times, I guess to see if Mousey was ‘sound’. And then, when Mousey had gone, they explained that Mousey wasn’t Our Kind of Boy, and that I wasn’t to invite him any more. Maybe it was because he’d eaten all the biscuits. Anyway, I never did invite him back to play at my house, but Mousey liked the old churchyard, and so I’d go there to meet him, and we’d lie down on a gravestone and play at being dead, which was basically just lying there, seeing who could keep his eyes shut for longest.

And then, one day, after Bunny died, Mousey taught me another game. He called it
Mousey, Mousey
, and it’s why I gave him his nickname. But it was a top-secret game, that no one else could know about. Except maybe his fat brother, Piggy, who sometimes came to look after him, but who wouldn’t tell anyone, because he was scared of their ma finding out.

The game was pretty simple. We played it down by the clay pits. That was where you got the mouse. You needed a mouse to play the game, and there were lots in the clay pits. You get an empty milk bottle (those little ones from school work well). You put some food in the bottom; a sweet, or maybe a broken biscuit. You stick the bottle half in the ground but at a tilt, so the mouse can climb in, but it can’t get out again. Come back a bit later, or the next day, and – boom. You can have fun with the mouse.

We played on Saturday mornings, when Mousey’s mum often liked to lie in, and my mum and dad went to their support group. Mousey would bait the traps the night before, and by morning they were always full. We used the largest of the pits, the one we called the Long Pond, and we dropped the bottles in, one by one, and watched to see what the mice would do.

Mostly, they died almost straight away. That was fun, but it didn’t last. So Mousey and I began to think up ways to make the game last longer. We used to make little boats from wood and float them in the Long Pond, or sometimes the shallow Crescent, or the three small pits that Mousey and I called the Little Injuns, but never the Pit Shaft, with its steep banks, which was much too dangerous.

Anyway, we’d launch the boat, and then we’d put the mouse on board. The mouse was always the captain, and then we’d bomb the boat with stones, or set it on fire with newspaper, or make giant waves with a piece of board and watch it pitch and rock until it sank. Sometimes the mouse tried to swim back. Then we’d just catch it and start again. Sometimes the mouse just stayed there, twitching a bit, but not moving. That was never as much fun. I preferred the lively ones.

After a while, our games began to get a bit more ambitious. We’d catch a dozen mice at a time, and float them away, like Noah’s Ark. Sometimes the mice used to pray to God to save them from the rising flood. God never answered. But that was OK. After all,
we
were God.

Sometimes Piggy came along. He was meant to look after Mousey when his mother was asleep. He was a bit older than Mousey, but he wasn’t anything like him. He was fat and stupid, and he was afraid of everything. He used to cry like a little girl when Mousey made him watch what we did. Sometimes he cried so hard that he could barely breathe, and his heart beat so fast that we thought it might burst. It was lots of fun, actually. Even better than the mice. It was like we’d taken all my fear and made it go into someone else. There’s a story like that in the Bible, you know. Jesus and the Gadarene. Jesus came across a man possessed by a whole load of demons. And he made the demons leave the man and go into a herd of swine. Then, Jesus made the herd of swine jump off a cliff into the sea, where they all drowned, and the man was saved. It’s a pretty cool story, actually. And it’s in the Bible, so it must be true.

And then, something awful happened. It was after the Christmas holidays. Bunny had been dead for a year. And Miss McDonald came into school with a ring on her finger, and said that from now on, we had to call her Mrs Lumb. She’d got married over Christmas, to another teacher at Netherton Green. She showed us the pictures and everything. We all got a bit of wedding cake. Everyone was excited. Except for me and Mousey, that is. Mousey because he rarely got excited about anything, except for the games in the clay pits. Me, because something important had changed, and I didn’t even know what it was.

It took me a while to figure it out. My mum and dad weren’t what you’d call super-big on the facts of life. I mean, I knew the important stuff, like touching yourself makes you go blind, and even
kissing
can send you to Hell, but stuff that married people do – that was still a mystery. I knew it must be disgusting, though. All the words for it were swears. Even
thinking
about it was a sin, and learning about it at school was wrong, which was why I wasn’t allowed to be in sex education classes. No, sex was like toxic waste, only to be handled by specialists. So the thought of Miss McDonald (I refused to call her Mrs Lumb) actually
having sex
with Mr Lumb, the Games teacher – who everyone called
Lumbo
because of his big muscles and tiny little elephant eyes – was just too revolting to imagine. And yet I kept imagining it. There were all kinds of things at the clay pits; all sorts of rubbish that people had dumped; piles of newspapers and magazines. Some of them were called
Knave
, and
Penthouse
, and
Playboy
, and
Razzle
. Those were sex magazines, I knew. I wasn’t supposed to look at them. But I couldn’t help it sometimes. I wanted to know. And Mousey, of course, knew everything. His brothers had already told him the lot.

Frankly, it was disgusting. I knew people had to make sacrifices, but honestly, this was too much. Between Mousey and those magazines, I soon knew more than I wanted to. And the worst of it was that, once those pictures were in my head, I just couldn’t stop seeing them – except that instead of the women in the magazines, I kept seeing Miss McDonald, and instead of the men, all I saw was Mr Lumb.

I had to do something about it. But I was a kid, not nine years old. What could I do? I waited. I talked about it with Mousey. Mousey didn’t seem to care as much. But then, Mousey didn’t go to Church. He didn’t know about demons and stuff. He didn’t even know about the sin of self-abuse. And so I watched Miss McDonald and her horrible husband coming to work together. I saw them talking in the yard when she was on supervision duty. When she was still Miss McDonald, I used to go and talk with her as she drank her coffee. Now, she talked with Mr Lumb instead, and laughed, and sometimes slapped his arm, and I was no longer her special friend.

It wasn’t fair. I still helped out; I still cleaned the blackboard and watered the plants. But Miss McDonald wasn’t the same. She didn’t talk to me as much as she had before she was married; she went home straight away after school, in Mr Lumb’s horrible car. She even stopped wearing those Indian cotton dresses. And once, when I called her Miss McDonald in class, she actually
snapped
at me and said: ‘
You know that’s not my name any more!
’ It wasn’t like her. Not like her at all. And now I knew what it was at last; that horrible man had got into her, infecting her with the demon of sex.

Yes, I know. I was naïve. But all I really knew about sex was what I’d seen in those magazines, and what I’d heard from sermons in Church. And I thought about the possessed man, whom Jesus cured by sending his demons into the swine, then herding them off a cliff. And I thought about those games with the mice. And then I thought about Piggy, and how he used to wheeze and cry when we drowned the mice. And the more I thought about it, the more sense it seemed to make. I needed to get Miss McDonald’s demons to leave, and go into something else, and then all I had to do was drown them, just like Jesus did.

And so I tried to think of a plan. Failing Miss McDonald herself, I needed something that belonged to her. I decided on her silk scarf, which used to hang on the clothes peg at the back of our classroom. One day, after school, I stole the scarf and took it away and hid it by the clay pits. It still smelt of her perfume, a mixture of incense and coconut. Now, all I needed was the swine.

Mousey was in on the plan from the start. Because he didn’t go to Church, he never really understood how the thing was supposed to work. But that was OK. He went along. As long as he was drowning things, I don’t think he minded.

We started with mice, as usual. I’d collected about a dozen of them. How many swine make up a herd? I hoped a dozen was enough. Anyway, we took out the scarf. It still smelt of Miss McDonald. I wrapped it around my shoulders, and then I performed the exorcism. Obviously I didn’t know the right words for an exorcism, but I thought if you said
thee
and
thou
, like the preacher does in Church, the demons would get the picture. Then we herded the mice off the cliff (it was only a small cliff, only a clay embankment into one of the pits, but it must have looked bigger to the mice) and waited for the charm to work.

It was great. It should have worked. But the next day, the Headmaster, whose name was Mr Rushworth, called me to his office. Miss McDonald was there, too, looking very serious.

‘I’ve received a very serious report,’ Mr Rushworth told me. ‘Do you know what that might be?’

I shook my head.

Miss McDonald gave me a sad look. ‘If only you tell the truth,’ she said, ‘then everything will be all right. Now listen. This is important. Did you take my scarf last night?’