The Gone-Away World (10 page)

He shrugs.

“It was a very bad ninja trap. Possibly an old, fat, stupid ninja might have tripped over and fallen on his stomach because he was laughing so much at this trap, and injured himself. If he fell in the right direction, he might have put one foot in the snare at the same time and been caught in it. But when he had finally caught his breath and finished laughing, he would just have cut himself down and gone away. Ninjas are not like rabbits.

“But that night, I woke up, and there was a ninja in my room. He was staring down at me. And he said:

“‘My name is Hong. You may call me Master Hong. What is your name?'

“So I told him my name. And he said:

“‘Do you know who I am?'

“And I told him he was
xiong shou,
an assassin, because I had never heard of ninjas, then. And he laughed.

“‘I am Sifu Hong of the Clockwork Hand Society. We are the sons of tigers. We are the hope of China—of the world. We are order. And you—you are the little boy who sets traps for us.'

“I didn't say anything, because I was afraid. And he said: ‘Children don't hunt tigers, boy. Tigers hunt children.' Which is actually not fair to tigers. It's only ninjas which hunt children. I didn't say anything. I was too scared to move, or cry out, or even to pee, which was something I very much wanted to do. He said:

“‘So now we have come for you, because of your pride. Because we always come, in the end. You are lucky. We have not made you wait. Because we always come, in the end.'

“And he drew out a knife, suitable for hiding under clothes at a very expensive banquet, or for opening the veins of a small boy. I prepared myself to feel the grating of that blade against my bones, the swift warm rush of my life, and then to find out what was the fate of children in the world beyond. And then—you understand, I was
very
surprised, and I thought for a moment this was part of his preparation to kill me—his left foot flew up in the air and he flew out into the hall, and the knife fell on the floor in my bedroom. There was a terrible cry, and silence. And my father came into my room, and carried me out into the hall, and there was my ninja, hanging by his foot, with a huge leather-working awl buried in his chest. He was hanging by the twine from a ninja trap just like mine. And my father held me by the shoulders and he made me look, and he said: ‘What did you do wrong?'

“I thought about it, and I thought about saying I had been foolish to involve myself in grown-up things, that I should have asked him before trying to catch a ninja, or that I had not considered the nature of my prey and should have made the trap to kill rather than to capture, or maybe just weeping because I was so relieved. My father asked again. And finally I said I had made a functional trap, but I had put it in the wrong place. And my father thought about this, and he thought long and hard, for he said nothing while we cut the ninja down and dragged his body into the main square. And then we walked home, and finally he looked back at the square and down at me. And he grunted.”

Master Wu smiles, and raises his hands like Bruce Lee, and says “Heeyayayay-HAI!” and throws his paper napkin at Elisabeth. She deflects it with the flat of her hand, and says “Pffft!” which is the noise hands-like-lethal-weapons make in movies, and she rolls off her chair and throws a pillow at me. I decide to let it hit me, and fling my arms wide to indicate that I have expired. Master Wu grins.

“He is faking! His dead-appearing
gong fu
skill is weak!”

And after that, it's a merry evening, and much fun is had by all before we must wash up the teapot and go on our way. And by then we have just about persuaded ourselves that, like the mango sun and the Chinese space effort, Master Wu's ninjas are one of his goofy jokes.

I
AM
so engrossed in my small world that I entirely neglect the bigger one, with the consequence that, when it comes time to look for a job or a place to continue my studies, I am utterly unprepared. The rest of the world is facing graduation and university. I am, again, tail-end Charlie. I do not know the language and I seem to have missed the deadlines and there's no space for me on the forms. Elisabeth is going to a place upcountry called Alembic, having quite naturally sorted everything out last year, and it is she who galvanises me, sets me on course again, stamps her foot until I pay attention.

“No!” she says.

“I'll—”

“No, you won't!”

“But—”

“No!”

She stares at me. At eighteen she is not pale or albino or that weird Scandinavian superblonde, but close on translucent, like something living in the dark of the sea. Almost, she is drawn in black and white, and this colouration is so strange that it distracts you from her face, which is strong, perhaps a little too broad, with features which lack the perfect symmetry of the
beautiful
or the mediocrity of
pretty,
so that she is
striking,
maybe
attractive,
but definitely
unique.
Until this moment, we have never had a conversation about anything which wasn't part of life in the Voiceless Dragon, and we are both confused and a little alarmed by this sudden shift. She frowns.

“Right. Go and see my mother.”

“I—”

She holds up one finger like a dagger.

“Don't make me stamp!”

At which point I have to confess that I have no idea who her mother is. Elisabeth looks at me as if I have grown an extra head.

“I'm Elisabeth Soames. I'm Assumption Soames's daughter.”

And now I know who she looks like, although it's too weird to think about it because Elisabeth is my own age and not a lunatic, and her mother is my headmistress, the Evangelist. I gargle at her.

She stares at me fiercely until I concede that I will talk to Gonzo's parents and ask them for advice, and if that fails go and talk to “Assumption,” and then she kisses me once, on the right cheek, and flees, to say her
au revoir
to Master Wu. I feel a curious lurch as she closes the door, and set myself firmly on track for the Lubitsch residence to talk about Embarkation.

Students at the Soames School do not merely graduate; the school's founders were secular men of rationalist bent, and they considered that the young persons entrusted to them for broadening and preparation were not going on to some higher realm of adulthood or finishing their studies, but merely changing venues in their search for truth. For this reason, and also because the Evangelist holds anything old as a natural good, as if a practice could acquire holiness with repetition—in which case certain sins she has forbidden in strident tones must surely by now qualify as redeemed and even redemptive—those leaving the school each year are said to be Embarking, and they are referred to not as Embarkees, which carries some stain of steerage class about it, but as Embarkands, which is both suitably academic and ineffably superior.

I do not feel like an Embarkand. I feel more like a castaway. Around me, young men and women are preparing for places at exalted colleges and working part-time or sponging to pay for them. They buy new clothes and pack suitcases and talk in a strange code about bunking and halls, freshers, gyps, mats and frats, about Noughth Week and courts and moots. When questioned, they fall silent and look embarrassed, which I take to mean that if you don't know already, there's no hope you'll be going. It is like a midnight feast to which only the cake-bearing elite will be invited, and I have no cake, no cake tin, and no book of recipes. Even if I did I lack means to purchase flour. Gonzo has naturally secured a scholarship to study Land Management and Agricultural Economics at a university called Jarndice; “naturally” because while it is absolutely forbidden to offer scholarships on grounds of sporting prowess alone, fortuitously LMAE seems to require a certain cast of mind whose academic virtues are not readily subject to conventional testing, but which is strangely and happily consonant with that required to grasp instinctively the tactics and strategy of a number of competitive field enterprises. Some students of LMAE, regrettably, become so immersed in this alternative use for their talents that they never, in fact, obtain a degree at all, choosing instead to enter the arena of professional sports. Jarndice University's horror at this waste of young minds is somewhat offset by the fact that these same sad failures often provide the best captains and star players for the university, and honour the Dear Old Place with small thanks such as libraries, pavilions, and (in one case) a painting by Van Gogh. Gonzo was interviewed for the scholarship in the LMAE admissions office, just off the rugby pitch, and after they'd talked about cows (Gonzo displayed a detailed knowledge of their digestive processes and expressed a hope that he might, working with a particularly comely member of the vet school, be able to discover a cure for the plague of flatulence and burping which had afflicted the university herd since his arrival on Thursday) and loams (Gonzo averred that he had no outstanding debts) and crop rotation (“My mother told me never to play with my food,” at which Professor Dollan nearly swallowed his pen lid and had to be carried out), the interviewees were invited to pop out onto the field for a friendly, informal, entirely optional
Interviewees vs 1st XV
match, in which the interviewees were thrashed 73–14, the visitors' points coming exclusively through the efforts of G. William Lubitsch. A post-match tally of incidents and accidents also revealed that Gonzo had legally but savagely incapacitated two members of the home team and taken significant hurts to his person without noticeable diminution of his ability, viz. a minor concussion, a briefly dislocated shoulder, three stitches over the left eye, two cracked ribs, and assorted bruises and impact marks which, on removal of his shirt, caused the physiotherapist to insist that he accompany her instantly to her office, where she could tend to his hurts more thoroughly.

It is not that Gonzo could not have found a place to study using his brain. He is more than capable. It is that this would have involved more effort than he cares to expend, or has ever needed to. Sport is just plain less taxing to him than chemistry or geography—two subjects he enjoys and excels in when he can be bothered—so sport he chose. I have somehow missed learning what questions I should be asking. And so, to my own surprise, I visit my headmistress in her study.

I am surprised at how small the room is, and indeed at how little is the Evangelist herself. I stare across her neat, filed, indexed, labelled and categorised possessions, past the pens in colour-coded groups and the little roll of paper stars used to indicate good work and the thick black-on-yellow toxic stickers for very bad work, at the staunch opponent of evolution who runs the school. It occurs to me that she looks a lot like a macaque monkey, which—on so many levels—is such a disastrous line of thought that I shut it down immediately. Instead, I wish her good morning, and she smiles thinly.

“I want to go to university,” I blurt, because with the Evangelist I have discovered that it is best to get the awful truth out in the open as quickly as possible and give her less time to pour out her acid wit. “Elisabeth said I should come and talk to you. At Master Wu's.” Because I wouldn't wish her to think, at this moment above all, that I was trifling—in a physical way, beyond the physical contact necessary to be thrown on the floor and immobilised in a leg bar, and considering the intimacy of physical intertwining implied in that position, which is suddenly sexualised beyond measure, I am bewildered at how I have survived it without either blushing or exhibiting other autonomous physical responses less ambiguous, and push this entire chain of thought from my mind lest I say it out loud—with her beloved (neglected) daughter.

The Evangelist doesn't answer directly. Instead, she leans back in her chair and steeples her hands. She purses her lips and touches each narrow line to the tips of her index fingers and closes her eyes. She inhales deeply and sighs, no doubt directing a prayer in the direction of her vengeful, arbitrary, prohibitive, humourless deity. Then she scowls at me from beneath lowered eyelids, reaches into her desk and produces a packet of cigarettes (“cancerous, blasphemous, steeped in the blood of slaves and mired in the culture of sin and sensuality which pervades this modern world”) and fires up a chunky Zippo lighter one-handed. She cocks the gasper at a jaunty angle in the side of her mouth and draws sharply through it.

“Alllll right, then,” says Assumption Soames finally. “I can fix that.” She sucks more carcinogenic sin into her mouth and expels it, dragon-style, from her nostrils. “Close your mouth, man, you look like a letter box.”

This is entirely likely. Until this moment I have assumed that Assumption Soames sets an extra place at table every night for God, sings hymns in the bath (which she takes dressed so as to avoid arousing anyone's erotic lusts, unfeasible as that seems on the face of it) and eats only gravel and oatmeal in order to avoid inflaming the senses. More recently, on realising that her daughter is the slender, elegant child/woman with whom I have been practising lethal and exacting modes of pugilism, and who seems like me to have no home to go to, I have envisaged a silent, crypt-like dwelling place of grey stone and burlap. Meals in my version of Warren are announced by a tolling of heavy bells, and the floors are made of bare pine which Elisabeth must sandpaper each morning so that they do not attain the voluptuous sheen of trodden wood. I have totally bought into Assumption Soames's public persona. This, it now appears, was naive.

I close my mouth, but don't know how to address this rather significant discrepancy, and the thought has occurred to me that this is some warped Evangelical testing process to determine whether I am worthy to receive the help and succour of her Church in my educational hour of need. The Evangelist I know is utterly straightforward in the most devious possible way, a subtle bludgeon like those computers which play chess by going through every consequence of every move there is. The Evangelist, when manipulating, plays across a broad field, takes advantage from every setback and emerges victorious in the micro by pursuing the macro at every turn. I dare not trust this new face. Assumption Soames glowers at me for a moment, then sighs more abruptly, and knocks her ash into an ashtray in the shape of a cherub. She wriggles, as if this is something she has been impatient for. It dawns on me that she is prepared for this moment.