The Burning Air (10 page)

16

T
O FIND EVIDENCE of the original corruption would expose MacBride for his hypocrisy. My mother and I were agreed on that. She began by writing to the school and asking if we could see a copy of the records for the scholarship that year. While we didn’t expect MacBride to be so stupid as to commit to paper hard evidence of his corruption, we were confident that some slip, some omission would lead us in the right direction. She exchanged increasingly terse letters with a secretary, probably in MacBride’s thrall, who told her unequivocally that the Cath was under no obligation to make its records public.

We agreed that our only option was somehow to infiltrate the establishment. We did try to enlist Kenneth in our plans but he was hurtfully dismissive of them, trivializing my mother’s conclusions as fantasies. Without him, we struggled to hatch plans that I could carry out alone. While my mother directed our play, I was, when it came down to it, unaccompanied on the stage. I alone carried the performance.

•   •   •

I saw Felix and Tara in the marketplace on a December afternoon. The square was tastefully sprinkled with Christmas lights that picked out their bright hair. Brother and sister were wired together by the earphones from Tara’s CD player. Felix seemed to have dropped a couple of inches from his height and the swagger had left his step. He didn’t swing his shopping bag but held it close to his chest, like a shield. They stopped to buy horse chestnuts from a steaming brazier. I drew closer. Tara had put on a little weight and grown taller. She wore her hair in two pigtails, creating an unfortunate Brunhilde effect. Felix’s hair had grown longer, to hang in front of his eyes. A breeze lifted the wing of his fringe to reveal a hollow of shiny red skin that whirlpooled to a glistening orifice where his right eye had been. At the sight of it, I lurched so violently that I turned around to see who had pushed me but there was no one there. My left foot tingled as if recalling the contact it had made with his flesh. Rowan MacBride’s accusing voice seemed to play in discord with my mother telling me that I was right to get my own back on Felix. I throbbed with shame and confusion, but also a sense of my own power. I think I cried out. I prepared myself for recognition, accusation, conflict, but Felix’s blank half stare passed through me and out the other side again. I was still nobody to him.

Their indifference shielded me in an invisibility that allowed me to follow them back to Cathedral Terrace. When they got home, Tara yanked Felix’s earphone out.

“Ow! Fuck
off
,” he said, and flicked her on the forehead.

“
You
fuck off,” she said, flicking his head back before unlocking the front door. A dozen fobs swung from the key ring. Felix pushed past Tara into the house and her bulging carrier bag burst, sending bubble bath and chocolate wrappers, clothes and CDs everywhere. She scrabbled to pick them all up before kicking the door closed behind her. The key stayed in the door.

I waited a few minutes for Tara to realize her mistake, or for a passerby to notice and knock, but it started to drizzle. Umbrellas went up and heads went down. With a hammering heart, I crept up the rain-darkened steps and retrieved the keys. Sheltering under a plane tree, I examined the bunch at close quarters. Among the charms and trinkets were four keys, one so small it must fit a window lock. A blue plastic fob had the number 4035 written on it in ballpoint. There was a While-U-Wait key-cutting place on the other side of the Green; I was there and back within fifteen minutes, high on my own daring. I tiptoed up to the front door and slowly, soundlessly replaced Tara’s originals in the keyhole, and went home to show my new set to my mother.

We studied those keys until their tiny metal ramparts were imprinted on our minds. She wrote the number 4035 in her notebook even though I had committed it to memory at first glance. “I expect it’s the number for her bank card,” said my mother, “to make it nice and easy for pickpockets to clear her bank account as well as get into her house. I don’t know what qualities the girl inherited from her father, but cunning wasn’t one of them.” She steepled her fingers and pressed them to her brow. “There will be something in that house that shows that Felix isn’t entitled to his education. Modern life always leaves a paper trail,” she said, gesturing to the box file that held everything from our birth certificates to our NHS cards.

The more specifically she talked about it, the more ridiculous it seemed.

“Let’s not get our hopes up,” I said. “That stuff’s probably all in some office in the school somewhere. If they even kept it.”

“Well, darling, you’re hardly going to find a signed confession, are you? But bank statements, school correspondence, there will be
something
that we can use, even if we have to get an expert to follow the trail. Now, let’s think. We can’t take it to the school authorities. It’s likely that the board is complicit in the corruption. The local newspaper is the obvious choice. Or a
national
newspaper? The
Times Educational Supplement
, perhaps, or the
Guardian
. Once we’ve exposed the scandal, if they pay us for the story, they’ll be out of the school, we can appeal, we might even be able to pay your fees ourselves. We could get you in well in time for A-Levels, darling. What do you think?”

Animation and happiness were so rare that I could not help but humor her.

“Yes,” I said. “They’ll rue the day.”

17

FEBRUARY 1998

W
AS THERE A busier house in Saxby than 34 Cathedral Terrace? There was always someone coming, someone going, adults, teenagers, old people. Sometimes I would wait for hours in front of an empty drive and unlit windows, I would gather my courage, and just as I stepped from behind the plane tree the front door would swing open and one of them would appear, or the car would pull up outside and all five of them would emerge. It seemed the place would never be empty.

Far from resenting the delay, I would have postponed the trespass indefinitely. My mother was buoyant with hope, happy in a way that I had not seen her since the years before my application to the school; if this was a delusion, I was happy to nurture it. It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive.

But there was still the outside chance that my mother’s hunch was right, and I finally breached the threshold late on a Saturday afternoon, eight hours into an all-day vigil. My copied key slid in as though oiled but immediately a shrill repetitive beep sounded, increasing in frequency and volume. On the wall I saw a little white box gemmed with emerald and ruby lights flashing in syncopation, the words “INPUT CODE” flicking across the dot matrix and seconds counting down to zero. The beeps were approaching a continuous screech when I realized it was a burglar alarm. I neutralized it with four seconds to spare, using the code on the trembling key ring. I was in.

I explored the red sitting room first, where huge framed posters for art exhibitions in European cities shared wall space with real oil paintings. A silver-framed print of the family windswept and laughing outside a big black barn that looked like a church without a steeple had pride of place on the grand piano.

The fridge in the basement kitchen was obscenely well stocked. There was a huge year planner on the wall above the bin; the present date was struck through with the word “Devon” written across the next four days in pink highlighter. The chart marked the rhythm of the household. Everything was written down, from Felix’s orchestra practice to Sophie’s term dates to the day the cleaner came (I made a mental note to keep out of the way on Wednesday mornings) and Tara’s modern dance lessons. Lydia spent the second Friday of every month at Saxby District Magistrate’s court. Was she a
magistrate
? It didn’t seem modern, or feminine: but then I had drawn most of my ideas about the magistracy from Fielding and Dickens.

I scaled the stairs, then worked my way down through the bedrooms. The desk in Felix’s bedroom had another chair by it, as though someone else habitually helped him with his homework. I opened his geography exercise book. An essay about land reclamation in the Netherlands was so badly written I had to stop reading after the third paragraph. This was not a boy who deserved a scholarship.

Under Tara’s bed I found a little red safety-deposit box covered in band stickers. The smallest key on my bunch opened it to reveal a shiny ravioli of condoms, and a half-smoked packet of cigarettes. Tara was only one academic year older than I was, but already she had crossed the threshold into the adult world that my own underdeveloped body suggested would never be mine.

Sophie was the eldest by some years but the gymkhana rosettes and talcum scent gave her bedroom the innocence of a child’s rather than a girl on the verge of womanhood. A University of Durham sweatshirt hanging next to her old school hat was the only clue to her age.

On a mezzanine level opposite a bathroom was a room that seemed to be the administrative heart of the house, lit by a little stained-glass window set high in the wall. An embroidery sampler cross-stitched with the word “Mummy” was propped in the corner of the large pine desk. A cherrywood bookcase with scrolled edges bulged with box files labeled “Children,” “School,” “Insurance,” “Car, Choir & Church,” “WI,” “Health,” “Campaigns,” “Savings & Investments,” “Pensions,” “Current Account,” “Contracts,” “Court,” “Devon,” “Moorfields Eye Hospital.”

I went through these files systematically and with diminishing excitement and confidence in my mother’s theory. “School” was nothing more than reports. “Children” was a batch of birth certificates, christening cards, child benefit numbers, and so on. “Current Account” did not contradict Mother’s theory—a year’s worth of statements and check stubs showed not a single payment of school fees—but neither did it confirm it.

After that, each file held increasing irrelevances. By the time I got to “Campaigns,” I knew that Lydia MacBride sat on a dozen committees, one against a new housing development outside the ring road, another against a mobile phone reception mast somewhere called the Otter Valley, and that she was, rather too late, lobbying the council to install CCTV in Cathedral Passage. In despondency I turned to her bookshelves. Paperbacks and classics shared space with textbooks about the justice system and psychology and youth offending. Cruel as her husband and children were, I could find little to despise about Lydia MacBride.

The Cathedral clock rang seven o’clock, and I had promised to be home by half-past. My mother was gracious in the freedom she gave me—she did not want her prison to become mine—and I could not abuse that grace by missing an agreed curfew.

I rearranged the papers as I had found them, feeling an echo of the way I’d felt the time I’d had to tell Mother that my appeal to Rowan MacBride had been rejected on the doorstep of this very house. I reset the alarm and let myself out through the back door using the old-fashioned Chubb key, slinking through the courtyard and the back gate into and along Cathedral Passage.

She was understandably disappointed when I didn’t come home with something more concrete, but I think I went some way to appeasing her by making my own chart with the information I had cribbed from their calendar. This also enabled me carefully to plan future intrusions.

“It’s all right, we’ve got another couple of days until they come back.”

I found nothing more that weekend but got to know the house so thoroughly that I could have searched it in the dark. In fact, my subsequent trips were all made in daylight, when no light from within would signal my presence. I used the rear entrance, like a servant. I went there as often as I could, made searches and dispiriting re-searches of that office, but to our increasing despondency, nothing ever turned up.

To counter my growing sense of impotence I began little interim revenges on all of them, tiny surges of power that kept me going until the ultimate retribution. Some were just for fun, such as repeatedly loosening the bulb in the reading lamp next to Rowan’s bed, or spitting in their food.

Other revenges were less petty. In the blind alley of Cathedral Passage I saw Tara kissing another pupil from the Cath, a good-looking black boy. The sight of them made my skin sizzle.

The next time I was able I checked her deposit box and was not surprised to find that she was now buying her contraception in packets of twelve. Using the smallest needle from the sewing kit in Lydia’s study, I carefully pierced the rubber all the way through each prophylactic, taking great care to smooth the foil back down again afterward. That day, triumph made me careless and I let myself out of the front door for the first time in weeks.

On the street I almost literally ran into PC089, the one who had questioned me over Felix’s attack. A split second earlier and he would have seen me descend the steps.

“Fancy seeing
you
here,” he said. He had changed since our first encounter, his face somehow giving the impression of accelerated aging without a single line or gray hair. “Scene of the
alleged
crime. I never forget a face. Or a name, Darcy Kellaway.”

I could feel his eyes on me all the way down Cathedral Passage, long after I had turned the corner.

18

FEBRUARY 1999

“
W
HAT ARE THESE stains, here on your trousers? They won’t come out,” said my mother, holding up my gray woolen trousers to the light. Strange dark patches traced the stitching of both pockets.

“I don’t know,” I said, flushing hot to the skull and turning my face to the wall so she could not read me.

“Very curious,” she said, but her tone was flat. She was staring at the wall, wearing her new permanent expression, the wide-eyed baleful look of a marmoset. Her body had become more simian, too, a fine black lanugo downing her matchstick limbs.

As she developed ever more elaborate ways to avoid eating, my cunning kept pace with hers.

The public library had a small shelf of cookery books and I returned time and again to a French recipe book whose lists of ingredients were rich with butter and cream. I was used to learning by rote and it was no challenge to memorize lengthy and complicated recipes. She checked my receipts, so I had to steal the little pats of butter that came free in cafés and pubs. I hid them the way that Tara MacBride hid her cigarettes and her contraception, balancing them on top of the lintel on the front door and smuggling them up the stairs in my sleeve and then, with sleight of hand, unwrapping and sliding the yellow slab of fat between the folds of a chicken breast, doubling its calorific value, overseasoning it so that she would attribute its unfamiliar richness to garlic and fresh herbs. I would pocket the foil wrapper again before she saw what I was doing, and that was how the grease had stained my trousers. I resolved to stick to my black tracksuit bottoms from now on, confident that it would not show up on the thick black cotton. I hated to deceive her, I hated it with all my heart, but I had no choice.

“Let’s do some work,” I said, to break her trance as well as change the subject.

“Yes!” she said, and reached for a text we had studied so often I could all but recite it.

“
An Ideal Husband
? Again?” I said. “Why can’t we do something new?”

I got off the bed, went along the bookshelf, let
The
Complete Shakespeare
fall open.

“
Coriolanus.
I’ve never even
read
it.”

“That’s rather more visceral than I’m equal to.” She closed her eyes and I wondered if she was about to drop off again. She had developed the sleeping patterns of a baby, twelve hours at night and naps in the day, too.

“OK, OK,” I said. “We’ll do the Wilde.”

I can’t remember precisely when it became clear that the pupil had surpassed the teachers, that my education had stalled. My mother was straining at the limits of her stored knowledge. We had exhausted the literature and history she knew: before she could teach me further she had to crib it herself. Kenneth’s lessons too had been repetitive for years and we were now reduced to the study of the algorithm he was working on to predict the numbers under the latex coating on lottery scratch cards. I could not suppress the unfaithful thought that one reason Mother had been so anxious for me to gain entry to the Cath was not my advancement in the world but an awareness of the limitations of my little tutor-family.

Matters were worsened by a schism in the tiny faculty. They were in passionate disagreement over two things. The first was her refusal to take the steroids the doctor had prescribed to strengthen her heart (which had, ironically, grown flabby—a common symptom of anorexia).

The second was the visits I paid to Cathedral Terrace. My mother kept faith that somewhere in that house was evidence of the corruption that had derailed the life I was destined to lead, and Kenneth was not as sensitive or protective of her feelings as I was. He broached the subject with a directness that was at best clumsy and at worst cruel. “I know what you’re doing,” he said. “Rowan MacBride, he doesn’t stand for all academia, you know. He’s not who you think he is. Heather, give it up.” The color left my mother’s face as if someone had pulled the plug on her blood supply.

“This is not about me. This is about Darcy, and what has been stolen, and what needs to be restored. This is about a family who are out to crush us.”

“They’re
not
out to crush you. You’ve got absolutely no evidence that any funny business took place. It’s all in here!” He tapped her head. “It’s making you both ill.”

“Darcy has never had a day’s illness,” said my mother.

“How can you call
that
healthy?” he said, jabbing his finger my way. “You’re starving puberty out of the child! Jesus, Heather! What is it, some kind of sick insurance policy against what happened to you? Do you know, some days I’m
this
close to calling social services, telling them what life is
really
like up here.”

Kenneth did not come up to our rooms for a very long time after that. He never did call social services, and I still saw him after that but lessons were conducted in cafés, beer gardens, and occasionally quiet corners of various Saxby bookmakers while the women behind the counter turned a blind eye. When conversation ran aground, we shared newspapers—front pages for me, back pages for him—and endless bowls of chips. If she was trying to starve puberty out of me, then he was trying to force-feed me into adulthood. I tried to refuse the junk food he bought me, but could not make a convincing excuse without betraying the truth. It was no secret that I was learning to cook but I was tempted to tell him about the butter and the calories I was sneaking into her body. I wanted to tell him to get him off my back and also, I think, because I wanted praise for my resourcefulness in teaching myself a new skill. But to confide in Kenneth would have felt disloyal and besides, to acknowledge the problem would have been to admit that I could not solve it alone. And I was making tentative progress. My clothes had in fact become interchangeable with those of my mother, and I was fairly sure that that was because I had grown, not because she was shrinking.

“I know you’re going along with all this to keep your mother happy, but sometimes I wonder if you’re starting to believe it yourself,” he said one day over curly fries and ketchup in a pub that televised horseracing. “You know you can’t . . . call something into being, just because she wants it, if it doesn’t exist.”

Those tiny facial muscles that serve only to hold back tears suddenly flexed and held. I did not dare speak, afraid that I would betray her, or myself. It was the same thing.

“I didn’t mean to upset you. I’m sorry, I’ve never been very good at things like this. What I’m trying to say is . . . your mum, she isn’t very well, she never has been. This whole wild goose chase, it’s not logical. I mean, what if you get caught? They could send you to a reformatory. How’s that going to further your mother’s cause of raising a bloody Oxford don?”

“I’m very careful,” I said in a clogged voice. “And I
might
find something, one day.”

“I know you don’t really believe that,” said Kenneth.

I shrugged and sucked the soggy potato from the crisp shell of the chip. I had long given up trying to make Kenneth understand. He didn’t know what it was like to come first with someone. He didn’t know what a responsibility it was. He would never understand that this quest, fantasy or not, had bound my mother’s love to me the way dreams of my future had done throughout my childhood. I had been doing it for so long that it was my constant companion, the way a lonely child is trailed from room to room by an imaginary friend.