The Disappeared (2 page)

His contract was for a year of probation, after which he could be promoted to become a permanent member of staff. His duties were to prepare pupils throughout the school for the GCSE exam in English, and to cater to the sixth-formers who were studying English at A level, for which the set texts were
Wuthering Heights, The Great Gatsby
, and
The Tempest
, three of his favourite books. And his main task was to persuade his pupils that such books have a value of their own, quite distinct from that of any films that might be made from them.

At first he believed he could easily do this. He read aloud to his small sixth-form class, pausing to draw attention to particular words and phrases, emphasizing points of character and plot, drawing comparisons with other works of literature of which they had never heard but towards which he hoped to arouse their curiosity. Sometimes he walked up and down, declaiming whole paragraphs without raising his eyes from the text. He wrote model essays and explained how they were put together: from the premises laid out at the beginning, he explained, you advance to a conclusion declared at the end. He designed a map of English literature, and handed out copies to guide their extra-curricular studies. And for a while he explained away their illiterate, staccato essays and dumfounded looks as the effect of his predecessor's teaching – an effect that he was bound to remedy in time.

During the first term, therefore, Stephen worked hard at his classes, often spending the evenings in preparation, and keeping separate files on all his pupils. He attended to their spoken English, went out of his way to correct ‘sort of', ‘kind of' and ‘like'. He gave extra time to the refugees from Iraq and Afghanistan, whom the Council had housed in the Angel Towers estate, to the indignation of many locals on the waiting list for social housing. He attended the meetings of the Parent-Teachers Association hoping to know their parents, who never turned up. He took charge of the third form football team, and discussed with the assistant head, Mrs Lilian Gormley, the possibility of starting a drama club and maybe putting on a play by Terence Rattigan. Mrs Gormley, a nervous and harassed-looking woman in her forties, greeted the suggestion with alarm, and told him to raise the matter with the Activities Committee, which he never did.

During lunch-breaks he often read the Koran with two Iraqi teenagers, Farid Kassab and his brother Hazim, who had taken him under their wing. The Kassab family were Shi'ites from Basra, who had escaped to Britain following the British capture of that city. Mr Kassab would send little notes via his sons; in them he explained to Stephen that Islam is an open door through which the troubled soul can pass to a state of serenity and freedom. Farid relayed this message too, and his gentleness of manner and elaborate respect touched Stephen's heart. Mr Kassab's notes were written in careful English, always headed with the
fatiha
, so that after a while Stephen learned to recognize the words in their written form –
bismillahi il-raHman il-raHim
, in the name of Allah, the compassionate, the merciful. The notes came with cakes and halwa, and once with the
Mathwani
of Rumi, in an English translation, dedicated to Mr Stephen Haycraft from Abdul Kassab with the greatest respect.

But Stephen could not reconcile the soothing faith of the Kassab children with the closed and often threatening attitude of the Sunnites from Afghanistan, who would be taken out of school illegally for weeks at a time, who entered the classroom behind blank retreating stares, and whose parents were more or less unknowable. After a while he concluded that the two faiths differed from each other as much as Mediterranean Catholicism differed from the forbidding Calvinism of old Scotland.

The opportunity to encounter Islam and to study its sacred text was, however, a source of joy to Stephen, and all would have been well for him, had he been attending St Catherine's in order to learn, rather than to teach. For here was a book that he needed to know, and here were those who could teach him to read it. But there was the constant battle on behalf of those other books – the books that had shaped the soul of Stephen Haycraft, and which he must now defend in their shrinking redoubt against the advancing army of screens, gadgets, computer games and apps.

It was three months before Stephen finally surrendered, acknowledging to himself that in the unequal battle between literature and Facebook his puny efforts amounted to nothing. The important point, he now realised, was not to attempt to plant in their minds the knowledge against which their lives inoculated them, but to show them how to fake it. Standardised essays, summaries of plots, a few apt quotations: it was all that he had the right to expect, and to insist on more was an act of gratuitous cruelty.

There was one pupil, however, who enabled him to believe in the possibility of education, and for her sake he kept a little corner of himself free from cynicism. Sharon Williams was a frail neglected-looking girl, who spoke very little, and sat in the lecture theatre a space apart. The eldest of the Williams family, she lived with her three brothers and their mother on the Angel estate. Jim Roberts had explicitly warned him of the Williams brothers, who regularly disrupted classes in the lower school and who would one day be described by their mother, as they began their first sentence for armed robbery, as ‘lovable rogues'. But Sharon was different: shy, attentive, looking up suddenly from her work with a shocked expression as though she had alighted on some truth that moved her. The Williams children shared their surname with their mother, but the boys were stocky, with dark hair and fleshy faces, whereas Sharon was delicate, with blond hair and fine features spoiled only by a slight scar across the corner of her mouth, which became visible on the rare occasions when she smiled. Almost certainly, Stephen thought, she did not share a father with the boys.

It was after Christmas that Sharon became a problem for Stephen. He had spent the holidays at his mother's house in North London, looking up old friends, reading, and making occasional stabs at a down-and-out novel. Returning to the flat in Whinmoore, he observed the sparsely furnished interior, with his few books and possessions serving only to emphasize its unoccupied appearance. He felt a pang of futility and loneliness. The life into which he had fallen was not the life he had planned. On the desk, however, was the essay that Sharon had shyly pressed on him in the last week of the autumn term, saying ‘please, sir, I done an essay,' speaking without grammar as they all did, since grammar marked you out as a freak.

He had read it that evening with astonishment. It was a slow, patient account of the love between Catherine and Heathcliff, of the mistake that Catherine made in despising the uncouth man who truly loved her and whom she truly loved. It described the moors, the isolation of the characters, and the absurdity of class distinctions in a place where wind and weather set the tempo and the goal of all events. One phrase in particular struck him: ‘Heathcliff,' Sharon wrote, ‘was a shrine, in which Catherine had placed the joys of childhood, hoping they would not spoil; one day she would return to them, and it would be too late, for the shrine was her tomb.' How could a child from Angel Towers write a sentence like that, with phrases from books and a semi-colon in the heart of it? In what corner of a council flat, with the TV blaring and flickering, her half-brothers fighting and swearing, and no doubt a mother resentful of her presence, had Sharon gathered those thoughts? And of course it flattered him that she had come with them to Stephen, hoping – no, knowing – that he would be moved. He picked the essay up and read it for the fourth time. Whatever happens, he said to himself, I will rescue this child.

There was no sixth-form English class on the first day of term. He looked out for her in the corridor. He peered into the lecture theatre at lunchtime, since she sometimes hid there. He walked for a while in the garden that had been laid out behind the Gothic heart of the school, where he had once seen her sitting on a bench, but which was now bleak, frozen and deserted. He left school late: there had been trouble with an Afghan father, who had arrived shaking with rage during the morning break, demanding to see his daughter. Eventually the man had made himself understood: his daughter was not to attend lessons in health education – the imam had personally forbidden it, and moreover the imam had explained what it meant. The man had refused to leave until he had his tearful daughter in tow. There had been a solemn confabulation in the staff-room after school, but it ended without agreement. Health education was on the national curriculum, and condoms were a part of it.

A girl was waiting for him in the lane that led to his flat. In the January dusk he could not make out her features, but the tenderness he felt, at the sight of a pale hand on the strap of a satchel, was proof that it was Sharon.

As he came up beside her he spoke her name. ‘Fancy it being you.'

He regretted the words. They seemed to suggest he was hoping for someone else and that he was talking down to her, as someone who could be easily discarded.

‘Had to see you, sir, din' I?'

She did not look at him, but fitted her pace to his in a way that sent a slight thrill through his body.

‘You mean about the essay? I looked for you, to give it back. It's brilliant. I've got it here.'

‘Oh, sir. You really like it?'

He had stopped to take the essay from his briefcase. She had turned to face him, with an astonished expression that showed the scar to her mouth.

‘I looked for you at school,' he said, ‘but I couldn't find you.'

‘I wanna there, wan I? Shouldna tell you that though.'

‘Here,' he said. ‘I've written a few comments at the end. There's some beautiful writing in it. And why weren't you at school?'

She looked at him with wide unblinking eyes. The astonished expression faded, giving way to an anxious tremor of the lips. Quite suddenly she took the essay and pushed it into her satchel, turning away and beginning to walk in the direction of his flat.

‘This where you live, innit, sir?'

‘Yes.'

‘I know cause I watched you. Once I went past an' you was in the winder.'

‘So why weren't you at school today, Sharon?'

‘Mum stopped me, dinna she? Here.'

She stood, lowered her satchel and reached into it. They were outside the block of flats. It would be natural to invite her in. She straightened and held a sheaf of papers out to him.

‘I done another one. Thanks for saying what you said.'

He took the essay and she was gone, running across the road and down an alley between two grey stone Edwardian houses, towards the Angel Towers.

He sat in the scuffed moquette armchair. This was the worst moment of the day, shut in by the flat that refused to welcome him, facing the void of the evening with no companion save the advert-riddled kitsch of ‘Smooth Classics' on Classic FM. He resolved to buy a car, drive out in the evenings, maybe stay overnight on the moors. He envisaged an old-fashioned inn beside a millstream, with a stone bridge over the water and a copse of battered, wind-swept pines. He looked down at the essay. And as he read his hands began to tremble.

The Tempest
, in Sharon's view, is a play about love and fear. Miranda is as much bound in chains of enchantment as Caliban, and how is she to know that the spells are good?

‘Chains of enchantment,' Stephen said aloud.

Sharon described another Miranda, whose island is on the fifteenth floor of a council tenement in Yorkshire. ‘Here the spells are not so good. But there is no undoing them. Nor do you know who cast them. Was it the woman, this Sycorax who claims to be your mother? Was it the Caliban who comes and goes on secret missions, or the boys whom he kicks and cuffs for their greater good? You have your corner, however, and there you can conjure brighter and more beautiful visions. You invent for yourself a Ferdinand, some washed up, barely rescued creature who is as lost and as spellbound as you.'

With growing astonishment Stephen followed the thread of Sharon's imagination, followed it into her fear-ridden corner as though he were Prospero, hovering at the window of that high-rise flat to say ‘poor worm, thou art infected'. By the end there could be no doubt about it, and she pressed the point home with simple, all too eloquent words:

‘So when you walk and work in front of me, piling up words like Ferdinand stacking logs, I want to take the book from your hands, to say “let's sit together somewhere”, and to free you from your chains, because I love you.'

He dropped the essay into his lap and let out a long whistle of amazement. It was, he knew, a catastrophe. He should hand in his notice at once, go far from Whinmoore, take up some other profession, forget that Sharon existed or that she could ever be rescued from the malign enchantment of the Angel Towers. But those things would not happen. She had spread the enchantment over him and he was chained by it.

‘Christ,' he said aloud, ‘maybe she's not reached sixteen. Not just professional misconduct but a crime.'

When, looking at the record, he discovered that Sharon had turned sixteen in October he breathed a sigh of relief, as though he had narrowly avoided the trouble to which he was now careering irreversibly. He put her essay in an envelope, and with it a note inviting her to come to his apartment after school. He sealed the envelope and placed it in his briefcase.

You know he has come through the door behind you, that he is moving towards you and will soon put his hands on your face. Why can't you turn to look at him? Your body is no longer your own. Nothing like this has happened before: even the time when, as a child, you lost your feet in the river Wye on that summer holiday in Monmouth, and the water closed over your head as though to swallow you forever. At last you find your voice.

‘Don't touch me or I'll scream.'