Stone Kingdoms (7 page)

He had given me an order, and as I walked towards him I felt conscious of the imperfections of my body. In his mirrored eyes I saw the smallness of my breasts and hips, the shapelessness of my legs, the shock of hair. A small girl again at a mirror, and beyond her only the merging of sea and sky. Dreaming another self, dreaming another life. He gestured me to the bed and I sat there in my grubby underwear which smelt of smoke and he didn't look like a doctor. Holding the back of my leg, his fingers pushed lightly into the muscle as he raised it towards him. He took off his glasses and I saw his blue eyes for the first time. They glanced up at me as he unwound the bandage and his fingers played slowly across the muscle.

‘Looks pretty clean, but keep it salved and bandaged until it heals up. Can't have you striking out before you reach first base.'

As he stood up I reached for a top and slipped it on while he replaced his sunglasses.

‘That's some head of hair, Naomi. With your colouring you'll need to be real careful with the sun. Always wear a hat or a headscarf and make sure your neck doesn't get burned. Irish, yeah?'

‘
That's right, Irish. And you're American?'

‘Chicago. I'm taking a couple of years out before starting a teaching post in medical school.'

Then he talked briefly with Martine and Veronica. I slipped on shorts and began to brush my hair. After he left, Veronica zipped up the tent and we sat on the edges of the beds and bathed our feet in what was left of the water.

6

They
slowly circle the cowering boy. They chant ‘Kill the pig! Kill the pig!', building up to a rhythmic chorus. ‘Kill the pig! Kill the pig!' Over and over, round and round, the spears and knives jerking and stabbing menacingly closer. The chanting grows louder until it seems to come from one throbbing throat. A chair gets knocked over, someone collides with a desk and the pig squeals as someone prods his rump with a ruler. Behind the paper masks and tribal war-paint eyes narrow and mouths tilt into leers. ‘Kill the pig! Kill the pig!' A boy bends over him and makes a throat-slitting motion with a rolled jotter. A first former comes to the door with an announcement about dinner tickets and they turn on him and chant ‘Kill the pig! Kill the pig!' until he runs from the room and, as the laughter peaks and then subsides, I clap my hands, help the pig dust his blazer and usher them back to their seats.

How did it feel? A laugh, Miss. We needed better spears, sharper knives. I let them spill out the silliness and then when we've had our laugh we start to talk. A bit scary, Miss. Why was it scary, Leona? Because you weren't really yourself any more, because like you could be anyone, someone different from yourself and no one would know. Another voice. It felt good, like we were all part of the same thing, like everyone was equal and there weren't any leaders. An argument. It was stupid – nobody can make you do anything you don't want. It's just a bunch of stupid kids pretending to be tough, egging each other on to do something they haven't the bottle for. But wait, let's ask how the pig felt. Funny, stupid answer first, then – On
your
own, Miss, different from everybody else and starting to think that maybe you'd done something really bad and deserved what was happening to you.

We talk about masks. Why did the boys paint their faces? Daniel understands. Because it helps them lose their inhibitions, because they're able to hide behind the mask, behave in a way that's maybe different from what they're normally like. Some don't understand. A joke about wearing a mask because it's an improvement on someone's face. Kerri understands – maybe you don't feel as guilty about what you do because you can put the blame on someone else. And when the talking's done we make a display. They work in groups, drawing and designing, cutting pictures out of magazines and, when they ask if they can play some music while they work, someone puts on a U2 tape and I pretend I like it. I've bought a poster of a desert island with palm trees and golden sands and we group their work around it. There are pictures from magazines of shadowy faces, painted sports fans, an African tribe performing a dance, the stone statues of Easter Island, a dark figure wearing a combat jacket and a balaclava silhouetted against some Belfast gable wall. We don't have a conch but someone brings in a large white shell and we hang it from the display board.

After school I stand and look at it all, read their words. ‘This book provides an insight into good and evil in the world. It shows that there is good and evil in every person and in certain situations this evil escapes and takes control of the person. It was the boys' own evil which brought the images of beasts and their own fears which made it real to them.' Around me the school sounds quiet, only the occasional banging of a door or the sound of a cleaner intruding into the room. I look into the deserted playground where empty crisp bags and pages ripped from jotters skirmish with the wind. I turn to Daniel's group. ‘The boys used masks to hide away from reality. By covering their faces they could turn into someone else, run away from
responsibility
and believe they will not be blamed for the violence they have used. The boys use rituals to unite them. When they come together they are not afraid of anything. The group gives them a power stronger than any individual.'

Some girls have written about how it would have been if it had been only girls on the island. The wind rattles and flaps at the corrugated roof of an outside store. ‘We think it would be slightly different with girls. At the beginning they would all stay in one group but after a while would split into smaller ones and stay with their friends. Girls would be more careful about things like safety and not physically hurt each other. They would be more scared of any creatures living on the island like insects. They would keep themselves clean and keep the fire lit. They would miss their families and their mothers.' In the playground some released detainee speeds towards the escape gates, his schoolbag slithering and bucking across his shoulders. As he meets the road two army Land Rovers pass by, the soldiers standing at the back like charioteers, their eyes skittering across street corners.

I am a teacher. I stand in a room at the end of a lime-green corridor and talk of Yeats and his gyres, the blood-dimmed tide of innocence loosed upon the world, of rough beasts, of Golding and his island. They sit in groups and stare at my hair, the clumsy clothes I have chosen to wear, my shapeless legs. Some, mindful of their exams, take notes, others sit comatose, cocooned in an inviolable world. On the walls of my room I have posters of characters from Shakespeare, displays of work and a picture of James Joyce. Some afternoons when I play them music or Richard Burton reading
Under Milk Wood
they roll their eyes or draw the names of heavy metal groups on the covers of their notebooks. One day I make a fool of myself by finding a homework diary in the corridor and ask which class Axl Rose is in. Their laughter is better than their indifference. I laugh too, and the next day someone brings in a Guns ‘n' Roses' tape and I pretend I like it.

I
remember it as an ugly building, the corridors painted that lime-green colour – probably a left-over lot from some store. Most things in the school are second-hand, with books and equipment salvaged from earlier closures. It straddles the peace-line of North Belfast, plumped in the middle of a road where two communities rub raw against each other. It had been a Protestant school until its enrolment withered away through population drift. Then it had been involved in a series of amalgamations with similar schools, but continued to diminish in stages like some Babuska doll until it was too small to be viable. When it eventually re-opened, it was as an integrated school, where Catholic and Protestant are educated together. The children come from various parts of Belfast and for a variety of reasons; some are there because their parents think it is a step towards a better society, others as a compromise – the products of mixed marriage. A number are merely misfits or rejects from other institutions. I think Daniel was in this last group.

I am the headmaster's dream come true. I like the job more days than not, like the children, the people I work with, and before long I secretly think of the school as my family. Each day I go home just before the caretaker locks the door, and I get involved in every activity I can. I think I feel happy, begin to believe I do a job that is important. The past slowly seems to slip into the clouded and faded mirror of sky and sea and I turn my face to the future. Sometimes I even think the children like me.

Now they sit in a circle, the symbolism of equality, of an equal voice, pushing them into a self-conscious display of maturity. They are to tell of a time when they experienced fear, and already some squirm with embarrassment, try to push their chair behind someone else's. Some will pretend to play the game, some will bottle it – that is the phrase Daniel would use – side-stepping the short moment in the spotlight with a carefully calculated anecdote. Something safe, held up a long arm's
length
from their private selves. Each speaker holds the white shell, the token which entitles them to a hearing, the temporary respect of the listeners, and when finished they hand it to another speaker in the circle. Everyone plays the game, gives the obligatory grimace when the shell is placed in their hands but some, perhaps for the first time, really speak.

The shell is held by Sinead. She takes a deep gulp as if she's going to dive into deep water, her back straight and stiff, one foot sanding the floor backwards and forwards, trying to smoothe the rising knots of nervousness. Then the words start, slowly at first and then breaking into a rhythm both fragmented and eloquent. She is seven or eight years old and she sleeps in the bedroom at the front of the house – Shona has not yet been born so she has the room to herself. It is late, she can't sleep – she likes to wait for the sound of her father returning from his shift in the bakery. Likes to hear his key in the door, the kettle filling for his supper. There are only her mother and herself and she is half asleep when she is wakened by a knocking at the front door and the sound of a voice screaming. A woman screaming, screaming for help, her words lost in the scream. Sinead's mother is trying to calm her and then slowly words filter into her room. Men have come in the night and shot the woman's husband. He is lying in the hallway bleeding. She hears her mother go next door and then there is a silence which is worse than the screaming and it seems to last forever and she thinks the men will come back to kill her too, and she is frightened. She hides in the bed and after a while she hears footsteps on the stairs and she starts to scream and then her father is holding her and as blue lights spin around her room he tells her everything will be all right.

She is fighting back the tears as she tells it, and I want to stretch out my hand to her but am not brave enough. No one speaks, no one moves, as she tells us that sometimes it all comes back to her in a dream and then she stands up, flicks her hair with a shake of her head and hands the shell across the circle to
Daniel.
I thank her and in the silence he looks at it, looks at Sinead, then looks at me and for a moment I think he is going to crush it between his hands, say he won't play my stupid game. I smile an encouragement and he stares again at the shell. I half-expect some story of brutality, some male posturing, a tale of gangs, of street cool, of survival.

‘I was ten or eleven and there was me and Gerry Lavery – Lav, he was called. We used to hang about together before we moved away. One winter – it was coming up to Christmas and it was really cold – we were living in Ligoniel then and there was this quarry up behind us on the mountain.'

Daniel was the first pupil I met on my first day, met before I had even taught my first lesson. I had parked my car at some shops on the road about a mile from the school, intending to buy a paper to hide behind in the staff-room. As I headed towards the newsagent's I read the headlines on the billboards hanging from the wire grilles on the windows, the raw abbreviations of atrocity, a blackened shorthand of some far-off tribal war. As I looked away the traffic suddenly slewed to a halt in a whining lurch and jerk of brakes.

‘We used to go up there a lot and sit on the diggers, or clod stones at cans. We had this stupid game we used to play where we climbed these mountains of loose stones and started landslides. And there was this pit which was always full of water – it was about waist deep and sometimes we used to float wood across it. Well, this Saturday afternoon when we went up it was frozen over, and when we threw stones the ice didn't break.'

Through the curse of horns ran a boy, his schoolbag slapping his back, his red hair an exclamation mark in the dullness of the morning. Weaving in and out of the cars and behind four or five other blazers of a different colour. Only then I realized it
was
a chase; saw that one of the pursuers, unrestricted by bag or uniform, was running parallel to the quarry on the pavement opposite and that soon he would cross over and cut off escape.

‘So Lav dared me to walk across it and I wouldn't at first, and I dared him but he wouldn't either, and then he kept calling me chicken and flapping his arms like wings. So eventually I said I would if he did it after me.'

In that moment too I realized the quarry was wearing a blazer that marked him as one of mine and I ran too, mindful of the startled faces of passers-by and the renewed flow of the indifferent traffic. I could see them now, the boy with no uniform hanging on, trying to pull the other down, to hold him long enough for the rest of the pack to arrive. And as it did a welter of voices and kicks broke over the boy on the pavement. As I reached them, he had managed to roll himself into a ball in the urine-splashed doorway of a boarded-up shop, the narrowness of the entrance restricting them as they pushed and jostled each other to deliver their blows. Their voices were guttural, rabid, synchronized with the smack and slither of their feet.