Silverstone Part One: Through Dark Waters (2 page)

But Ben remained largely quiet,
anxiously eyeing the old wooden beams of the Great Hall that
towered above them, the rickety old staircases leading up into
forgotten corners of the school, and the deep, rich colours
everywhere that felt so unwelcoming. It smelled damp and cold. The
floors were hard stone and polished wood, with the exception of the
patterned carpet on the raised platform at the far end of the hall,
from where the school assemblies were delivered.

They moved on to some other
buildings after the Great Hall, and towards the end of the tour
they came to the school gymnasium. It was a large brick building
set in a lonely spot near the edge of the grounds, housing an
exercise hall and a swimming pool. As they approached a light rain
began to fall, and the group hurried as much as they could behind
Ms Villeneuve, who produced a large black and grey umbrella from
somewhere, but refused to compromise her steady pace.

It was a relief to Ben to step
inside, and the bright lights of the exercise hall seemed
reassuringly modern to him. He enjoyed playing most sports – he
thought he was fairly good at them – and the hall brought a feeling
of safety after the creaking stairs and crumbling walls of the
other buildings. Ben’s mother squeezed his shoulders reassuringly
as they entered.

“The gymnasium is well equipped
as you can see, and our boys and girls are required to participate
in three exercise classes every week. We pride ourselves on an
excellent performance record within the Greater London leagues and
our boys and girls participate at county and national levels as
well.” She made a sweeping gesture around the room, ending at a
small door in a corner on the far side.

“The original building was
destroyed in a fire in the 1920’s but was originally constructed
around 1750 at the same time as the Great Hall where we began the
tour. At the time of the fire it was little more than the swimming
pool, which we will visit in a moment, and a tennis court where you
are now standing.”

“There you go Jord, you like
tennis,” Jordan’s father declared.

Ms Villeneuve glided toward the
small door.

They passed through the door,
and then into the boys changing rooms. The twin girls held their
noses tightly, afraid of any residual smells of boys that had
changed there previously. Then the group hurried through the long,
open boys shower room, whose faucets looked unlikely to be capable
of providing anything except icy cold water, before finally coming
into the pool room.

The room was very dark despite
the lights, but Ben slowly looked around. It was a large pool,
probably Olympic sized, he thought, with a spring diving board at
one end, and lanes marked out with the usual dividers. There was
the normal chlorine smell coming from it, but the water must not be
well heated at all, as it was still fairly cold in the room and
several of the group had wrapped their coats a little closer after
they had come in. On the other side of the pool there were a few
spectator stands, and Ben noticed a man dozing on them under his
cap; a mop and bucket propped up nearby.

Ms Villeneuve led the tour
around the pool in the direction of the stands. “As you can see,
the pool itself has been around for some time.” She smiled as if
this was expected to draw a laugh, and a few of the parents
obliged.

“Is there a school swimming
team?” Ilse asked.

“Yes of course. The teams
practice after school with Mr Taylor on Tuesdays and Thursdays
throughout the school year, beginning with the initial team
selection trials during the first week of term, and they compete in
the Greater London Swimming League, with an excellent record.”

The girls nodded.

“And always a lifeguard?” their
father said, with a frown.

Some of the parents muttered
quietly.

“Some kid drowned here once,”
Jordan’s father explained to Ben’s dad in a mock whisper, whilst
patting him repeatedly on the back as if trying to help him with a
ticklish cough. “In the middle of a swimming class too. Big
mystery. But that was a hundred bloody years ago when they didn’t
mind about losing one or two of the students!” He burst into loud
laughter and moved away.

Ben’s father smiled gratefully
for the information.

Ms Villeneuve stepped in to
answer the question. “Yes there is always a lifeguard present
during swimming classes and competitions. I assure you the pool is
quite safe.”

Ben looked around again. There
were extravagant mosaic patterns around the pool and under the
water. It reminded him of the Roman baths he had seen in Bath, when
his family had visited. Not your typical school swimming pool, he
thought. He wondered why they hadn’t updated it. It was probably
one of the protected historic buildings he was learning more and
more about.

But the water was the most
peculiar thing about it. The shallow end directly in front of where
the group stood seemed brightly lit and still, except for the churn
of the chlorine pumps. But as they walked around toward the
bleachers side and the deeper end the water became unnaturally
dark. So much so that Ben couldn’t even make out the bottom. The
light cast by the bulbs beneath the surface seemed barely to be
escaping. Just how deep was it? he wondered, looking for depth
markings. He couldn’t see any. Was it his imagination or could he
spot movement down there?

Even the surface of the water
seemed to move with a heaviness more like the open sea, with
powerful rises and troughs like the deep water far away from the
safety of land. He was glad to be standing on the side, but still
felt as though he was at the unstable edge of a great yawning ocean
trench.

He edged away back to the
group, which was pretending not to look at Ms Villeneuve as she
addressed the man who had been lying on the seats.

“Mr Evren please, I have asked
you before. You are not to sleep here on the bleachers like a” –
she paused momentarily – “beggar”. Her perfect composure and
posture cracked just a little.

The man had turned and sat up,
but did not look directly at Ms Villeneuve. Instead he gazed at the
pool. Ben noticed it was the same man who had been painting the
chimney earlier.

“Yes Ms Villeneuve,” he said,
with a low, musical accent that sounded quite at home in the old
school.

Then he stood up, taking his
mop and bucket, and turned to Ms Villeneuve. He appeared about the
same age as the headmistress, but there was something very much
older about him. Perhaps it was his beaten clothes and cap, or his
craggy face and paint-dappled hands. He smiled softly, disarmingly,
but his eyes were sharper even than Ms Villeneuve’s.

The headmistress seemed to lose
her composure once again.

“Yes,” she said. Her eyes
dropped away, and she turned back to the group, which was watching
Mr Evren intently.

“Let’s move on,” Ms Villeneuve
said, and they began to walk back toward the changing rooms.

As they left, Ben glanced back
at the pool quickly, and then at the strange man. He was
motionless, watching the pool. But just at that moment, he turned
to look straight at Ben.

That evening Ben eagerly took
Toby and Paddy to the little park just up the road and played in
the late summer sun that had burst through the drizzle as they
arrived home. The aching in his chest all but disappeared as he
chased after Toby, rolled on the wet grass with Paddy, and laughed
till he was too tired to move. Toby rode on his back, and they
pretended to be warriors on horseback valiantly fending off Paddy
the terrible dragon, and for a brief while all the coming changes
were packed away out of his mind.

Three weeks later, Ben started
at Hulstead College.

Before they left home, his
parents took almost half an hour posing him for photographs in his
new school blazer on the front doorstep. He noticed several other
children being put through a similar ritual as he glanced up and
down the road.

When they were finally
satisfied, his parents delivered him to the stone steps of the
Great Hall, and hugged him vigorously. He felt the ache in his
chest returning as he waved goodbye to them. Finally, after they
were out of sight, he joined the herd of other uniformed children
trudging off towards their classrooms.

Ben’s heart pounded above the
chatter of children as he climbed the stairs to the second floor of
the Newton Building, and walked down the long, gloomy corridor to
room 2D. He walked through the open door into a small classroom,
which contained about thirty wooden desks, arranged in six columns.
There were a handful of other students who had already claimed the
desks at the back of the room, and were playing on their phones,
relaxing into their new territory. At the head of the class was a
large table, and an enormous blackboard covered the front wall
behind it. He carefully selected a seat in the first column against
a wall, and in the middle row, hoping that this would avoid the
prominence of a front row seat, but also the appearance of mischief
from proximity to the back row, and therefore maintain a balance of
anonymity as far as possible. There was also a large boy seated
directly in the line of sight from this desk to the teacher’s,
which would further advance his strategy.

Room 2D gradually filled up as
it drew closer to 8.45am, and Ben met some of his new classmates. A
girl called Lucy Day walked in soon after he did, and smiled at
everyone, before sitting directly in front of him. She had a little
white streak in her dark brown hair, and earring studs in the shape
of tiny pineapples and strawberries.

“Hi I’m Lucy Day,” she said
with a beaming smile that was as white as a toothpaste advert.
“What’s your name?”

“Ben Silverstone,” Ben replied,
trying to remember if he had brushed his teeth in the hurry that
morning.

“Do you live in the
village?”

“Yes we just moved to Pickall
road a few weeks ago, to the little cottage on the corner.”

“Oh wow that’s a beautiful
house I’ve always dreamed of living there!” She was still
beaming.

“It’s a bit old, but my parents
really like it I suppose. Where do you live then?”

“I live over in East Hulstead
near the East Hulstead Tavern, so it was really easy to walk here
up the hill.”

Ben wasn’t sure exactly where
East Hulstead or the East Hulstead Tavern were. He talked to Lucy
for a while before the other students seated near him arrived. She
didn’t seem to have any of the first day nerves that Ben and some
of the other students did, and helped relax all of her
neighbours.

Behind Ben sat Jordan Knight,
who Ben had met on the school tour with Ms Villeneuve. They
exchanged a few pleasantries, but Jordan seemed more interested in
shouting over Ben towards Lucy than talking to him.

Ben had the wall to his right,
but to his left, a tall, lean and tanned boy called Freddy sat,
whom Ben thought looked far too old to be in his year. Freddy and
Jordan seemed to know each other already and quickly became
absorbed in discussing their summer holidays and sporting
achievements.

Sylvie arrived with Lucy and
sat next to her. She was a French exchange student spending a term
at Hulstead College and staying with Lucy.

“I.... do not speak se good
English, I ‘ope se teachers will be nice to me, do you think?” she
said.

“I’m sure they will be,” Ben
responded. They talked for a while about her school in Paris, which
sounded even older than Hulstead College.

Behind Freddy was a boy called
Hidashi, who had grown up in London and was now boarding at
Hulstead College because his parents had moved back to Tokyo. He
laughed a lot at everything Ben and anyone else said to him and
seemed very happy to be there.

Room 2D finally reached its
full capacity, and the noise of the children inside it reached an
almost deafening intensity. Then, just after the school bell rang
for the beginning of classes, the students began to discern a soft
thudding noise, and slowly quietened to listen more closely. The
thudding was causing puffs of dust to fly off the blackboard and up
from the table at the front of the room, and it was even making
some of their pencil cases rattle towards the edges of the desks as
it grew louder and louder. Finally the thudding stopped, and the
door swung open. The most massive, muscular man Ben had ever set
eyes on stooped through the doorway, and thudded towards his table.
The children coughed and shielded themselves from little pieces of
the ceiling falling onto them. After a moment of rearranging the
papers at his desk while the dust settled, the man took up a single
sheet and a pen, and introduced himself.

“Ladies and gentlemen, my name
is Mr Lomonosovsky,” he pronounced in a thick accent.

Jordan and Freddy sniggered
loudly, but Mr Lomonosovsky was unphased. He probably could have
squeezed the life out of each of them at the same time without much
effort at all if he had chosen, Ben thought.

He quickly took the roll call,
and then began. “We start this first day with Science, of Physics.
So what is Physics, for you?” He waited.

“It’s a type of science,”
Hidashi shouted eagerly, “to do with movement, and things like
that”.

Mr Lomonosovsky was pleased.
“Yes good. Very good. This class is obvious to be one of strong
ones.” He seemed to flex an enormous bicep, and Ben worried his
shirt would tear.

“Physics is movement yes, and
power and energy.” He paced across the room towards the blackboard
as if to demonstrate. “Physics teaches us about concepts of matter”
- he crushed the chalk to the blackboard, leaving a powder trail
falling from the words as he wrote - “and energy, and how these
interact to give us things like heat, light, sound, electricity,
magnetism, and so on.” He waved his hands as if collecting all of
these things in a mighty ball.