Different Class (30 page)

I began to go to the clay pits alone, in the mornings, and after school. There wasn’t time for pirate games, or toy Noah’s Arks, or bombings. But I was growing out of that. All I liked was the drowning. I’d bait a few milk bottles every night, and in the mornings I’d harvest them. Most days I’d catch one or two. More, if I was lucky. I’d put them in the little cage I’d made from string and chicken wire, and I’d lower them from the top of the bank into the Pit Shaft, the deepest of all the clay pits. Sometimes, the mice were Mr Lumb. Sometimes, Mr Rushworth. Sometimes, Miss McDonald. But, whoever else they were, Mousey, they were always you.

It had been a whole term since the thing with Miss McDonald’s scarf. The clay pits were green and flowering, and there were ducks on the water. Pretty, except for the burnt-out cars, and of course the litter. Spring was in the air at last; wild garlic grew in the hollows. And, with the spring, there were lots of mice. Mice are rapid breeders. Rats, too. The females can get pregnant every three weeks, with litters of a dozen or more. That means a lot of sex, I guess. That’s why we call them
vermin
.

Meanwhile, at school, Miss McDonald announced that she was leaving at Easter. No one told us why, but I knew. It was because she was pregnant. All that sin had finally made a life inside her. They call it a miracle, Mousey. But the truth is, it’s disgusting. On TV it’s different; a nice clean baby, wrapped in a sheet. But really, it’s disgusting. Did you know that mice and rats actually
eat their babies
? They do it when they get upset. They eat their babies, Mousey.

That’s when the nightmares started again. I’d started to have them when Bunny died. Nightmares about drowning, and nobody coming to save me. Sometimes I used to wake up in the night and realize I’d wet the bed. Of course I knew Miss McDonald wouldn’t eat her baby. But I sometimes imagined her giving birth, and that too gave me nightmares. I tried to keep those bad thoughts away by staging mass drownings of rats and mice. But the bad thoughts kept coming back. Thoughts, and dreams, and terrors. I started to feel it was all my fault. That the demons I’d given birth to were coming back to eat
me
.

And then, without warning, Mousey turned up one sunny day at the clay pits. I was sitting by the Pit Shaft, looking into the water, when I heard him come up behind me. He’d never been all that talkative, so I wasn’t expecting an apology or anything. Still, I thought there might have been some reference to what had happened between us. Instead, he just came to sit on the bank beside me, looked into the Pit Shaft and said: ‘I know where we can get a dog.’

I mean,
a dog
. It was tempting. ‘What kind of dog?’

‘A Jack Russell,’ he said.

‘Whose is it?’

He shrugged. ‘A stray, I guess. It doesn’t have a collar.’

By then, I was thinking hard. Not about killing a dog, though. Those demons were talking to me again, and this time, I was listening.

I said: ‘How soon could you bring it here?’

He thought about it for a while, and then said: ‘I could bring it tomorrow. It comes to me. I’ve been feeding it.’

I pretended to hesitate. ‘I dunno.’

Mousey waited patiently. He must have known I’d come round. But why had he come to find me? I thought. Was this his way of making amends?

Finally, I nodded and said: ‘Tomorrow morning, before school. Bring the dog. Don’t tell anyone.’

I hardly slept at all that night. I was too excited. I went over my plan again and again, imagining every scenario. I knew I had to get it right. I knew I’d only have one chance. And I knew that if it worked, then all my demons – a legion of them – would vanish for good in the clay pits.

My plan was pretty simple. Miss McDonald had told us in school about the danger of playing near water. You could fall in, she told us. Even if you could swim, you might not be able to get up the bank. There are things under the water; old cars; fridges; traps. A kid could get his foot caught. It could happen tomorrow. And we’d all seen that Public Information Film, both at school and on TV.
I am the spirit of dark and lonely water
;
ready to trap the unwary, the show-off, the fool.
When I first saw it, it gave me nightmares. But after the clay pits, I realized that I
was
the Spirit of Dark Water. My victims – the mice – were all part of my plan. And now, I had another plan. I was going to get Mousey.

I got up early the next day. I had some preparations to make. I told my parents I’d promised to get to school early to water the plants, and then I ran to the clay pits and waited there for Mousey. At eight o’clock sharp he arrived, with a dog trotting at his heels. It didn’t look much like a Jack Russell to me, more like a kind of mongrel, but it seemed happy enough to be there, eating biscuits from Mousey’s hand. Dogs are pretty stupid, I thought. Still, so are most people.

Mousey came up to me with the dog. ‘How are you going to do it?’ he said.

‘We’ll throw him in the Pit Shaft. The bank’s too steep for him to get out. He’ll swim around a bit, I guess, but in the end he’ll drown. It’ll be like—’ I racked my brains for a good analogy. ‘It’ll be like the
Titanic
,’ I said.

‘The what?’ said Mousey.

‘Never mind. Did you bring enough biscuits?’

Mousey nodded.

‘All right. Bring him here. Right up to the edge of the pit. I’ll tell you when.’

Mousey went right up to the edge of the flooded Pit Shaft. The water was so deep it was black. The bank was like an overhang; not too high, seen from above, but I guessed that even for a boy, it might be very hard to get out once you’d fallen in.

‘Bit closer,’ I told him again, and Mousey bent down to call the dog, pulling out a handful of biscuits from his pocket.

All I had to do was push. That had been the plan, at least. But Mousey was stronger than I’d thought. I tried to lunge forward, to push him in, but he must have guessed somehow. He grabbed hold of my hair and pushed back, yelling and swearing like a mad thing. The dog got excited and started to bark. Then it bit me on the leg.

I told you I didn’t like dogs. Well, that’s one of the reasons why. If that stupid mongrel hadn’t got in the way of things, I might have managed to keep hold of Mousey and push him in. But the stupid dog got in the way, and started to bite at my trouser leg, so that when Mousey started to fall, I went with him, and Mousey screamed – not just a little muffled scream, but a huge and terrified scream – and we both fell, with a giant splash, into the freezing water.

I remember hitting the water; how cold it was, and how dirty, with a film of oil on the surface and that stink of mud and rotting things. I went under – not a long way, just a foot or two, I guess, trying not to think about traps beneath the surface; rusty cars and shopping trolleys, and fridges with their jaws half open, like giant clams in adventure books about pearl-diving in the South Seas.

Of course I could swim. We all could. We used to go down to the local baths and jump in in our pyjamas. So I could swim pretty well, but the bank was slimy. I reached it in moments, but, try as I might, I couldn’t get enough of a grip. Next to me, Mousey was panicking; scrabbling against the clay; crying and screaming and sobbing. I thought that if I tried to stand on his shoulders, I could maybe climb out, but before I could try out my theory, I heard the sound of footsteps, and a face looked down over the bank at me.

‘
Oh, my God. Oh, my God.
’

It was Piggy, Mousey’s fat brother. He must have been hiding away somewhere, not wanting to see what we’d do to the dog. I thought at the time that it was a bad sign that he’d invoked God that way. Of course I didn’t seriously think that, given a choice, God would favour Mousey’s pig brother over me, but you never know with God.

For a second he stared at us both, hair in his eyes and mouth open. Mousey screamed. The dog barked. It was like a nightmare.

Finally, Piggy managed to break his paralysis and move. ‘Ma’s going to
kill
me for this,’ he wailed, and reached out to haul Mousey out of the pit. He looked completely terrified. Tears were running down his face, but he managed to grab hold of Mousey’s hand and pull him up the banking.

Mousey was screaming all the time. ‘
He pushed me! He pushed me!
’ But I was screaming too, of course, and the dog was barking like crazy. I guess it was pretty funny, but I didn’t think so at the time. At the time, I was thinking:
Is this what Bunny felt that day?
– and:
So much for those sixty years
.

Finally, Mousey was back on dry land. I shouted for him to help me. But he and Piggy just stared at me from the top of the bank; Mousey wet through and shivering; Piggy shivering nearly as hard; just staring at me in silence, as if they were waiting for something. Now that I saw them so close together, I could tell they were brothers. They had the same blue eyes, the same mousey hair, the same
look
– except that Mousey was thin, of course.
This is the wrong way round
, I thought.
The swine should be in the water, not me
.

It was the dog that saved me. Someone walking his own dog heard it and came to investigate. He found me still in the water, and Piggy having a choking fit, with Mousey trying to shut up the dog by feeding it biscuit after biscuit. I know. It sounds quite funny now. Even so, I might have died. I might have drowned, like Bunny.

Both of us left Netherton Green after that; Mousey, to Abbey Road Juniors. My mum and dad tried to teach me at home, at least until they were sure of me. I never saw Mousey again. Of course, I denied his story that I’d pushed him in, and although his brother supported his tale, the waters had been muddied enough for me to escape retribution. The school made a few enquiries, but by then I was already gone. I don’t suppose there was much point after that. I think my dad guessed something, though. In any case, I got to see a whole lot of specialists; people from different churches who decided that I was susceptible, and that My Condition (yes,
that
was what they were calling it now) needed careful monitoring.

And that is how, eventually, I ended up at St Oswald’s, which has actually turned out to have quite a few compensations. At least until Poodle messed it all up. Talking about me behind my back. Taking my place with Mr Clarke. Just like that business at Netherton Green.

Just like you, Mousey.

8

September 26th, 2005

The Thirsty Scholar public house has been a traditional annexe of St Oswald’s for over half a century, providing Games teachers with a lunchtime pint and Sixth-Form boys with a place in which to meet their Mulberry counterparts. We have an unwritten rule whereby if they take their ties off, we, the staff, do not know them, or ask if they have turned eighteen. The boys return the compliment. Of course, to a St Oswald’s boy, the thought of a Master letting his hair down – of indulging in a couple of pints and maybe a pasty and a Gauloise; of buying a few groceries at the local corner shop, or, still less conceivable, of socializing with the opposite sex – is a freakish occurrence akin to two-headed dogs and plagues of locusts from the sky. My boys, for all their affection, secretly imagine me spending my nights at St Oswald’s; sleeping at my desk, perhaps, or hanging behind the stock-cupboard door, next to my discarded gown.

Of course, we are all of us prone to these assumptions. We prefer our people to stay in context. Perhaps that was why Harry Clarke’s revelation came as such a surprise to me – not the idea of his homosexuality, but of
any
sexuality. And perhaps that’s why, when I went in today, I was so surprised to see the Headmaster alone at the bar, smoking a cigarette and drinking something on the rocks.

The end of his silk tie stuck out from the top pocket of his suit – it seems that Johnny Harrington still believes in the talismanic removal of the necktie to confer invisibility – and he was already slightly drunk. Not enough to fall over, but there was an absent look on his face, an unusual vagueness in the way he moved his hands, which strongly suggested the man had imbibed. Which was strange, as I’d always believed that, like my own GP, Johnny Harrington
didn’t
drink spirits, or smoke cigarettes, or indulge in anything stronger than a glass of wine with his evening meal.

I found a seat by the window, where I hoped to go unseen, and ordered a pint and a ploughman’s from Bethan, the young woman who serves at the bar. I wasn’t
spying
, precisely – but something told me that Harrington wouldn’t be happy to see me, and besides, I was very curious to know just what he was doing there, drinking alone in a village pub, when he had a wife at home—

I suppose I was thinking along the lines of an illicit liaison. I don’t have much experience in these things, but Shitter Shakeshafte was well known for his dalliances with a string of School Secretaries, and I’d already noticed that Danielle was slightly starry-eyed about the new boss. I suppose he’s not unattractive – at least not to people like Danielle. But that Shakeshafte, bad-tempered and pachydermic as he was, should find such a degree of romantic success speaks volumes for the aphrodisiac effect of high office, and Harrington, with his youthful face, smooth hair and easy charm, is the kind of man any woman might find passably attractive.