The Burning Air (9 page)

14

JANUARY 1997

T
HE LETTER DID not come until the other side of a Christmas during which my confidence remained robust. Whenever I reran the exam and the interview in my head I could find no fault in either. It had not otherwise been a good holiday; on the twenty-second of December the doctor had been to visit, wasting his peppermint breath on advice about fresh air and exercise and telling my mother that it would be a good idea if she could visit him at his office next time. She pressed the prescription he gave her with the others, in the gap between
Emma
and
Persuasion
, and did not speak again until Christmas lunchtime, when Kenneth arrived with a John Lewis hamper that made her recoil.

The letterbox finally broke its silence after noon on the tenth of January. I had to go down and collect it. The envelope was small and flimsy. What did that boy know, I told myself as I dragged my feet up the stairs. I couldn’t have failed. I’d done my best. I couldn’t have let her down. It was unthinkable. But as my mother read, her lips thinned to razors.

“I don’t understand,” she said, handing the letter to me. I scanned it, took in something about the high standard of applicants before the letters began to swim. “You said it went well.”

“I thought it did!” I said. At first I mistook her silence for anger at me, but it was more of a contemplative hush. In the street outside, someone threw a series of bottles into the banks. Farther away, the cathedral clock chimed the quarter-hour.

“Well then, there’s been some kind of mistake,” she said eventually. “Of
course
you got in. You were
destined
to. This ‘Rowan MacBride, admissions tutor’”—she spat quotation marks around his name and title—“he’s obviously got you muddled up with someone else. I’ll have to . . .” She looked at the telephone, reached out, snatched her hand back as though it were hot. I remain unsure whether that was the point at which her agoraphobia expanded to include outgoing telephone calls or if it was just the first time it happened in front of me.

Then she was at her desk, writing a letter of her own. When she had finished, she handed it to me and said, “This is asking for an investigation to see how the mistake was made, and asking them to put it right. Remember it might just be that this Rowan MacBride’s secretary put the wrong name on the letter. Be gracious about it, show them how well brought up you are. It’s going to be terrible for the other boy or girl who thinks they’ve got a place, but what else can we do?”

I made the miserable, pointless walk into town last as long as I could. By the time I approached the Cathedral Quarter, it was half past four and Rowan MacBride was leaving school, wrapped in a thick gray coat and a school scarf. I watched him turn right into Cathedral Passage, the narrow, covered alleyway that ran between the high school walls and the back of Cathedral Terrace, a long row of four-story town houses in the same faded gold stone as the school and the Cathedral. The terrace broke halfway along the alley, and he disappeared through the back gate of one of the corner houses.

I could hardly follow him, so I walked through the gap in the alleyway and viewed Cathedral Terrace face-on. The pavements were worn flagstones and the lampposts the original Edwardian fixtures, and a grassy bank lined with mature plane trees set the houses back from the pavement and the Cathedral Green beyond. Each small front garden had been tastefully converted into a short driveway.

He had entered number 34. I climbed the steps and pressed the bell, a little white ceramic button set in concentric circles of polished brass. The door was opened by a girl in her late teens who had the kind of looks that made a mockery of my mother’s attempts to make me invulnerable to beauty. She had smooth blond hair, English Rose skin, a straight arrowhead nose, and full lips that parted to reveal a flash of complex orthodontia.

“Hello,” she said.

I tried to talk without showing my own teeth, but it was impossible. “Is Mr. MacBride in?”

“Dad!” she shouted over her shoulder. “He’s got selective hearing when the cricket’s on.
Daaaad!
Visitor!”

I turned my attention to the interior of the house. The doors were inset with stained-glass harlequin windows that threw diamond lights on the mosaic floor. When Rowan MacBride opened one, the hall became a kaleidoscope. His daughter finally tore her gaze from my mouth and flitted through the door before it closed.

“It’s me,” I said, but his face was blank. Anger bubbled inside me. Only days ago he had written the letter that had ruined my life and my face was already dismissed from his memory. I gave my full name, one he had read out and written down. He had signed the letter addressed to it. Still nothing.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Can I help you?”

I held out the letter. This time recognition did dawn.

“Ah.”

“I’ve come to ask for another chance. Another interview, another exam. Can I make some kind of appeal?”

“I’m sorry, Darcy. There was a very high standard of applicants this year, and I’m afraid that one boy, a prodigiously gifted musician, had the edge over the other children.”

Two more children, a boy and a girl, also blond—what was this place, some kind of Aryan breeding experiment?—emerged in the hallway. This time they were about my age. She wore the uniform of the Cath, a pleated skirt and V-neck sweater. He was dressed for its prep school in shorts and tasseled knee socks. The boy in particular looked anachronistic, like an evacuee from the Second World War. They must have been as aware of the chasm between their privilege and my disadvantage as I was. I felt my heart harden against the whole family.

“If I don’t get into this school, my life is over,” I said in that strange new parched voice again.

“Well, that’s rather dramatic, and it’s certainly not true,” he said. “The comprehensives round here are
excellent
.”

Now his hypocrisy fired my resentment.

“If the comprehensives are so good then why don’t
they
go there?” I asked.

“Felix, Tara, back inside now,” he said without looking at them. This time his tone was slow and deliberate. “
Excuse me
. How I educate my children has nothing to do with you. The place has been allocated this year, to a deserving child, and there really isn’t anything I can do to help you. I’m sorry. Good evening.”

The door was as solid as a wall.

I looked up to see the boy and the girl, Felix and Tara, in an upstairs window. I had already begun to return her smile when I realized that she was forcing her top teeth over her lower lip and raising her hands up beneath her chin to impersonate a rodent. Through the plate glass I heard her brother squeak. They laughed so hard they had to wipe their eyes.

•   •   •

I kept it together on the walk home but the minute I was back in our rooms I cried.

“I’m so sorry. I did my best. I only wanted to make you proud of me!” I told her everything: the lovely house so close to the school. How Rowan MacBride hadn’t even known who I was. How his beautiful daughter had stared at me as if I was a freak (even as I told the tale through tears, there was a tiny part of me that was hoping this might sway her on the braces front. I was only twelve, after all). The casual way he had told me that my scholarship had gone to a musical prodigy. How his children had laughed at me. By the time I had finished, Mother was rigid with fury; her hands were all knuckles.

“To reject, then bully, a
child
,” she spat. “What kind of people are these MacBrides? All the power and the privilege they have and they abuse it like that. I can’t bear to hear it. I am in
unimaginable
pain. The way to hurt any parent is through their children. What happens to you happens to me.”

“Oh, I wish I hadn’t told you!” I said. “I didn’t want them to hurt you, too!” I lost control again, hating myself even more in the light of what she’d just said, every tear I let slide a fresh strike on the raw welts of her own pain.

“Oh
darling
, no, I don’t blame you. You know how special you are. You
know
that. I blame them. Not only stupid for not recognizing what you are but rude and cruel, too. This is typical of academia, I’m afraid: those that deserve aren’t always those who receive. Well. We’ll get to the bottom of this. I’m sure there’s more to this rejection than meets the eye. We won’t let that school—that family—get away with this.”

Suddenly she leaped up from the bed, and her grief mask was replaced by a bright smile. “Well! We mustn’t let this little setback slow down your studies! We’ve got to coach you into
Oxbridge
, darling. We’ve got even more to prove now. Maybe if we really cram, you can go a year or so early . . . do you know, I think you’re probably old enough to start some Spenser.” She stood on tiptoe, retrieved a bricklike anthology from her highest bookshelf, sat down, and patted the bed next to her. This lively mad optimism was almost more intolerable than her pain, but still I nestled into the curved steel of her embrace and began to read aloud from
The
Faerie Queen
.

The hour for supper came and went. When hunger got the better of me and I asked if we had anything in, she gestured to the sugar-free sweets in a bowl on the windowsill. I ate some of those while I made a cup of tea for both of us. She had stopped taking milk in hers and all we had was the powdered sort. I ate crumbling lumps of that, forcing them down my throat like the bulge in the throat that heralds tears.

15

OCTOBER 1997

O
N THE FIRST day of the autumn term I watched the new intake of Cath pupils pour through the school gates. The youngest MacBride, Felix, was among them. He was accompanied by his older sisters, their father—who looked smaller without his gown—and a mother who waved them off and blew kisses through the railings before returning, shadowed by me, to 34 Cathedral Terrace. She seemed in many ways the inverse of my own mother—fair, plump, happy and confident, diluted between three children and a husband instead of poured, concentrated, into one child. The family was everything we were not, and had everything we did not.

I spent a great deal of time that autumn walking the streets of Saxby, from the marketplace to the ring road to the little ancient warrens that threaded the Cathedral Quarter. I always contrived to pass Cathedral Terrace, and would pause before number 34, leaning against one of the plane trees to watch the family. Dark can see into light, but not vice versa. They did not hang net curtains in their huge plate windows, so after dusk the house became a little toy theater, the MacBrides playing out their domestic dramas against the deep red walls of their sitting room. I say dramas; there was little conflict in that self-reflecting, self-satisfied household. They seemed to be entirely ignorant of the world outside and the pain they might have caused to those with whom they shared their city.

I would stand for hours, watching them come and go, a warming envy in my veins, before returning to our rooms on the Old Saxby Road, where the litter was piling up and the stairs had not been vacuumed for months. Since the rejection, Mother had lost what little weight she had ever carried. She spent hours with her head in her hands, as though it was heavy with the weight of her task, working out where things had gone wrong and looking for a way to redress the balance. Sometimes she wouldn’t even notice me come in.

It was not uncommon for me to find her going over my entrance letter, or the mock examinations she had set me before my entry, convincing herself that the standard of my work was enough to scrape an A-Level pass, wondering again what had happened to intervene between me and my birthright. She laid the blame entirely at Rowan MacBride’s feet, spoke endlessly of his poor judgment and bad manners. I wondered if she protested so violently against him because it cost her too much to think that the one at fault might be me.

One afternoon in late October, I was making the day’s final circuit of the Cathedral Quarter when I saw Felix MacBride in conversation with a red-haired girl. Their uniforms were a jealous green. She carried a flute, while his little black case contained what I guessed to be a clarinet; the timbre of their voices corresponded with their instruments. The wind was behind them so that their words were thrown over their shoulders and I could hear them from a distance of ten paces.

“My mum doesn’t do paid work,” honked Felix. “She only does voluntary work, because she wants to be around for us.”

“My mum does,” trilled the girl. “To set an example.”

“To pay the school fees, more like.
My
father hasn’t had to pay for
my
education.”

“How come?”

Felix tapped his nose with one finger. “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.”

It was the carelessness of his arrogance that did it; I felt a tugging sensation deep within me, as though some tethered force were beginning to strain at its moorings.

A large black car was parked across the entrance to Cathedral Passage. The girl climbed into it without much of a good-bye. Felix continued down the alleyway, the school wall high to his left, the back walls of the terrace running to his right. The city itself seemed designed for that boy’s convenience. I fell into step behind him, synchronizing our footsteps so that the sound of my own shoes on the flagstones would not alert him to my presence.

Felix was halfway along the passage when the bells began to ring out for five o’clock and suddenly the dark force inside me came loose. I ran to push him facedown onto the cobbles. The clarinet case flew out of his hands and fell open on impact with the floor, the components of the instrument rolling and bouncing on the stones. Felix, still in the prone position of his pratfall, reached to grab a little black cylinder; I stamped on his fingers. I was possessed. I had never done anything like this before and I wondered why not, because this feeling was a primal savage high. A boiling river that flowed from a place too deep to name poured through the levee of my anger at Felix. Despite my inexperience, instinct told me the best places to hurt him. My violence was disproportionate to my size and Felix’s terror blinded him to the ease with which he could have overpowered me. The clock was still striking the hour; each knell a corresponding injury, a foot to the ribs, another to the face. Felix had curled into a ball, his hands over his head. His pale chin provided an ideal target for a kick, but at the last second he moved, and instead of the expected crack there was a squelch as the flesh of his face surrendered to the toe of my shoe.

Softness brought me to my senses where resistance had not, and I stopped.

I seemed to have a gargoyle’s eye view of myself, standing before Felix as he whimpered through his fingers. What had I done? What had I done? What had I
done
? Fear and regret poured into the place so recently vacated by anger, and cowardice, too. When the first blood seeped through Felix’s cupped hands, I left him moaning on the ground and ran through the gap in Cathedral Terrace.

Rowan MacBride was putting a bag of rubbish in the bin outside his house; he looked up, but I was halfway across the Green before recognition had a chance to dawn and anyway, my face was hardly foremost in his memory. Across the Green I stopped to recover my breath and try to make sense of what I had just done. My instinct was to cover my tracks; whatever rogue criminal spirit had possessed me for that terrible minute in Cathedral Passage had evidently deposited some kind of folk wisdom before it had left me. I ducked into the British Heart Foundation shop and picked a pair of nearly new size-4 trainers from the shelf. They were a perfect fit. My old shoes, which I now saw glistened red around one buckle, I threw into a rubbish bin just outside the city center.

•   •   •

The policeman turned up on my doorstep at the same time as me. His gleaming badge identified him as PC089.

“You on your way back from the Cathedral Quarter, by any chance?”

A fresh wave of fear engulfed me. “Me? No.”

“We’d best talk this through with your mum anyway. Is she in?”

It was the one certainty. I knocked four times. “It’s all right, Mother, it’s only the police.”

“How many times?” she said when she saw my uniformed escort. “Darcy is
homeschooled
.”

Three miles away, the Cathedral clock rang out for evensong, and I watched the realization dawn that they wouldn’t pick anyone up for truanting at this time of the day. “What’s happened? Has someone hurt you?” She tucked my hair behind my ear, looked to the policeman.

“May I come in?” said PC089, shoving his way through the door. He took in the shabby room, eyeballed the books as though trying to decide what on earth they could be. My cheeks burned as he glanced down at the carpet, where my mother’s fallen hair had begun to mesh itself into a loose, dark weave. “PC Jon Slingsby, Saxby Constabulary. We’ve had a report of a child being mugged in Cathedral Passage.”

“Oh my God,
darling!
” And then, “Do we have to go to the station?”

“Darcy isn’t the victim.” He turned to me. “We have eyewitness reports of you being at the scene.”

My mother turned her gasp into a laugh just in time. “When is this ‘mugging’”—those quotes again, only this time she smiled them around the words—“alleged to have happened?”

Slingsby pulled out his notebook. “We can pinpoint the exact time of the attack to five p.m., because the clock was chiming the hour.”

“Well, that’s easy. We were here, together, doing our prep,” said my mother, waving a hand toward my study. She lied for me without hesitation because she thought she knew me to be incapable of violence.

“Prep?”

“I suppose someone like you would call it homework. Although it’s
all
homework, really. As I told you, we have all Darcy’s lessons here. I can give you the number of the local education authority; we’re in constant touch with the inspectors. Look, is this an actual
arrest
?”

My empty guts churned; I wished she wouldn’t call his bluff.

“Not yet,” he said. “We’re waiting on a positive ID from the victim.”

When he had gone, my mother unhooked her smile and shivered.

“What in heaven was that about?” she demanded. “And what are you wearing on your feet?”

I was about to explain and apologize when a hammering on our front door shook the windows in their frames. We peered through the nets at the street. A black Range Rover was parked at an acute angle to the curb, the front wheel on the pavement, driver’s door open. Rowan MacBride was standing directly underneath us, his face dark with rage. I felt my mother’s hand slacken on my shoulder.

“Kellaway! Darcy Kellaway! I
know
it was you, I know I saw you. You’ve been hanging around outside my house for months. Don’t think I haven’t noticed. If I’d had any idea you were going to . . . I mean, I knew you had a strange sense of entitlement, but this . . . what the
hell
has
Felix
done to
you
?”

The street came alive at the drama. The students opposite actually sat themselves in the window, swinging their legs over the edge of the sill. Rowan’s academic authority carried no weight on a street like ours, used to the genuine menace of bailiffs and drug pushers; this was light relief to them. “When my son is out of hospital, I’m going to the police again. We won’t let this go until charges have been brought against you and have stuck. A civil case isn’t out of the question. In the meantime, if you come anywhere near my family again, if you come anywhere near my
school
”—at the mention of the word “school” the little claw on my shoulder resumed its grip—“I will dial 999 without hesitation, do you understand?”

Again he stared into the blank glass of the ground-floor windows, as if expecting an answer. Finally he gave a little slump of defeat and returned to his car. The audience dispersed. Mother turned on the bedside lamp. The dull gold glow threw her face into a relief map of hills and caves.

“I don’t know what came over me,” I said. “He was swinging this stupid clarinet all over the place and bragging about how he didn’t even have to pay for his school fees, and I just thought, it’s so unfair, that he should get to go there and I . . .”

“He had a clarinet?”

“What’s that got to do with—”

“And he definitely said that his family haven’t paid for his education?”

“Yes, but—”

“And when you went to the house, MacBride said, didn’t he, that the scholarship had gone to a musical prodigy.”

I could almost hear her synapses fizzing. She punched her palm. “Of course. Of
course
! I ought to have worked it out myself.”

“Huh?” She was leaving me behind, the way she sometimes did when she raced through a text I’d never seen before.

There was a loaf of bread on the sideboard. To my utter astonishment she pulled off a big hunk and began to chew.

“He’ll have given the scholarship to his own child!” she said through a dry mouthful. “Academics are notorious for nepotism, closed shops, old-boys’ networks. The minute they get found out, they close ranks and sling mud. God knows I should know that better than anyone.”

I flinched: even an oblique reference like this put me on high alert, but she was high, soaring on a current I couldn’t see. I let myself believe that her conclusion was the correct one: the world was full of things she understood better than I did.

“You’re going to have to be clever about it from now on,” she said.

She’d lost me again. “Clever about what?”

“
Revenge
, darling! They stole your intellectual birthright. Of course you’re right to be angry, to want to get your own back. But it ought to be cerebral. Anyone can go in with fists flying. Violence is down there with sex and drink, and . . . and
shit
. They stole your future. They stole your
future
, Darcy. How can a few cuts and bruises, only the body, which is
nothing
, atone for that?” It was the means, not the end, of my behavior that she disapproved of. From her words I was able to wring forgiveness that made the incitement that followed easy, logical, necessary. “You’re going to have to do better than that. Seek revenge, but make it like-for-like. This isn’t boxing. It’s chess.”

Her eyes shone with an enthusiasm that canceled my misgivings. I gave myself up to the pursuit of our new common goal. I lay awake for hours, excitement and fear conspiring against sleep. I wondered what we would have to do, what we could take from that family, to ever make it enough.