The Rotters' Club (35 page)

‘Excuse me, Mr Prefect,’ they said, crowding around his legs. ‘May we stand in the bus queue please?’

‘May I put this chocolate wrapper in the litter bin, please, Mr Prefect?’

‘Do you mind if my friend and I talk to each other, Mr Prefect? You won’t put us in detention?’

‘Just piss off, the pair of you,’ said Benjamin, and they ran away laughing delightedly.

He tried to tell himself that the furore would soon die down. It was the same at the end of every term when the new prefects were announced. And at least this time there was another, genuine scandal to keep everybody talking: the snubbing of Culpepper. Most people had assumed that he would become School Captain, or Vice-Captain at the very least. But it turned out that he had not even been made a prefect. Accounts varied, but the most colourful said that he had been weeping openly by the notice board when the names were posted up. He had used expressions to describe the Chief Master and the Deputy Chief, Mr Nuttall, which had shocked the few members of the sixth form who were worldly enough to understand them. And – but again, versions of this story differed, and few people could believe that it was really true – some witnesses said that he had spat at Steve Richards, another of the newly appointed prefects, when they passed in the corridor.

The bus was a long time coming, today, and before it arrived Benjamin glimpsed Cicely approaching him from the other side of the Bristol Road. It was 4.30 on a wintry December evening. Dusk was already falling, and she was protected against the cold by a full-length cashmere overcoat and enormous cloche hat; as usual, she drew the attention of everyone waiting at the bus stop; the crowd even pulled back a little to let her pass, and it was a source of unspeakable pride to Benjamin when she walked straight up to him and planted a kiss on his cheek. The coldness of her face was delicious, and they held each other in a lingering hug: the sort of hug you might expect between an affectionate brother and sister.

‘Oh Benjamin, I’m so proud of you,’ she said. ‘You’ll make a wonderful prefect, I know you will.’

‘Do you think so?’ (It was the first time anybody had said anything like this to him all day.) ‘Everybody else has been so… funny about it, so censorious. Do you think I’m doing the right thing?’

‘Everything you do is right, as far as I’m concerned. I have absolute faith in your judgement.’

He felt on the point of exploding with happiness when he heard these words. He had barely spoken to Cicely this term and had almost forgotten (no, that could never be true; had forbidden himself to remember) what wonders she was capable of doing for his self-esteem. Suddenly he knew that he had to see her again.

‘This is your bus,’ she said, kissing him goodbye. ‘Don’t let me keep you.’

‘Cicely – do you think we could go for a drink again soon? Some time over the Christmas holidays? It seems ages since we talked.’

‘Gosh, that would be lovely, wouldn’t it? Absolute heaven. I’ll call you.’

Something in the way she said it made Benjamin know that it would never happen. And Philip, who had overheard most of their conversation, broke it to him on the bus home that these days, so the rumour went, Cicely was having an affair with Mr Ridley, the husband of her Latin teacher, and he would never let her go out for a drink by herself with someone from the Boys’ School. Benjamin sighed and watched the first flakes of snow start to settle against the window of the bus. He always seemed to be the last person to find out.

*

Bewildered by the events of the closing days of term, he sought to anchor himself, over the Christmas holidays, in the relative certainties of family life.

Lois had come back from hospital again, and was living in her old room. The intervals between her severest, most paralyzing bouts of depression were getting longer and longer, to everyone’s relief. Loud noises still scared her, and she could not tolerate violent films on the television. They had to be careful not to present her with anything that might remind her of the events of November, 1974. But she was able to hold down a job, for the time being, even if it was nothing more arduous than a few hours each day behind the counter of the local off-licence, and there were other encouraging omens. When her Aunt Evelyn gave her a postal order for Christmas, she spent the money on a five-year desk diary, and began writing in it on New Year’s Day. Everyone interpreted this as a sign that she had begun to think more hopefully about the future.

Paul kept himself to himself. He sat in his room most of the day, either working on his school holiday assignments, or poring over the pages of
Time, Newsweek, The Spectator, The Listener
and the other political weeklies that had lately become his favourite reading matter. On Christmas night, when the rest of the family gathered round the television to watch
The Morecambe and Wise Show,
he stayed upstairs, reading a collection of essays by the economist Milton Friedman.

Colin and Sheila were delighted at Benjamin’s success. When she sewed the new prefect’s badge on to his school blazer, Sheila’s eyes were so cloudy that she could barely see to thread the needle.

Even though they only lived a few miles up the road, it was a family tradition (in a family which regarded tradition as inviolable) that Benjamin’s grandparents should come to stay for three days at Christmas. The subsequent seventy-two-hour orgy of overeating and television-watching had always seemed to Benjamin to be one of the highlights of the year, but this time, perhaps because he was weighed down by thoughts of his new responsibilities, perhaps because he was simply so unhappy with the recent progress of his relationship with Cicely, he could not raise any real enthusiasm for it. He went through the motions, but that was all.

There was only one moment which, whenever he thought about it, days or months or even years later, seemed to have a different texture to it, almost an aura of the numinous or sublime. It happened on Christmas night, while Paul was upstairs absorbing the rudiments of monetarism and the rest of them were watching Morecambe and Wise, and it concerned Benjamin’s grandfather.

Benjamin had been feeling a new kinship with his grandfather over the last few months. It dated from a time in mid-August, when the family had been holidaying in North Wales and his grandparents (because this – of course – was the tradition) had come to stay in a nearby guest house for a week. One uncharacteristically sunny afternoon, Benjamin and his grandfather had gone for a walk along Cilan Head, and had stopped, as was often their custom, to rest for a while on the twin mounds of Castell Pared Mawr. From here they had an incomparable view of the immense, azure ocean as it slapped restlessly against vertiginous cliffs; despite the dense afternoon haze they could see right across Porth Ceiriad bay and towards the islands of St Tudwal’s. They contemplated this awesome scene in silence for many minutes, until Benjamin’s grandfather, without any kind of preface, said an extraordinary thing:

‘Who could possibly look at this view,’ he asked, ‘without believing in the existence of God?’

It was a question that required no answer, which was a good thing because Benjamin, as usual, would not have been able to think of one. He had never suspected that his grandfather held religious convictions, and had never mentioned to him (or to any of his family, besides Lois) his own strange moment of revelation in the locker room at King William’s more than three years ago. Benjamin had come to feel that religious belief, at its most sincere, was an essentially private thing, a wordless conspiracy between oneself and God. It was overwhelming to discover, almost tangentially, through an offhand remark, that his grandfather might be a fellow-conspirator. Benjamin glanced at him curiously, but he was staring out to sea, his eyes almost closed, his silver hair rippling in the breeze. Nothing more was said on the subject. A few minutes later they moved on and continued their walk.

Benjamin’s experience on Christmas night was very different. Harder to think about, harder to pin down. It happened in the middle of
The Morecambe and Wise Show.
Benjamin was sitting on the sofa, with Acorn – now an old, fat cat – stretched out on his lap. His grandfather was sitting in an armchair, to his left. Morecambe and Wise were doing a sketch with Elton John. Ernie was trying to put together a musical number, in which Eric sang the main tune and then Ernie added a counter-melody, while Elton John accompanied them on the piano. Every time they tried to rehearse it, it went wrong. Eric would sing the first few bars, but then as soon as Ernie entered with the counter-melody, Eric would stop singing the main tune and join in with his partner. It was a corny routine, but the consummate timing of the performers, the electrical rapport and empathy between these two middle-aged men who by now were the most loved entertainers in Britain, turned it into a miracle of spiralling hilarity. Suddenly, sitting entranced before the television, Acorn’s purrs sending slow vibrations of contentment through his body, Benjamin had a fleeting vision: it came to him that he was only one person, and his family was only one family, out of millions of people and millions of families throughout the country, all sitting in front of their television sets, all watching these two comedians, in Birmingham and Manchester and Liverpool and Bristol and Durham and Portsmouth and Newcastle and Glasgow and Brighton and Sheffield and Cardiff and Stirling and Oxford and Carlisle and everywhere else, all of them laughing, all of them laughing at the same joke, and he felt an incredible sense of… oneness, that was the only word he could think of, a sense that the entire nation was being briefly, fugitively drawn together in the divine act of laughter, and looking across at his grandfather’s face, convulsed with joy, a picture of gurgling ecstasy, he was reminded of the face of Francis Piper, when he had come to King William’s to read his poetry, and how it had seemed to resemble the face of God, and at that very instant Benjamin found himself thinking that perhaps his ambitions were all wrong – his desire to be a writer, his wish to become a composer – and that to be a bringer of laughter was in fact the holiest, most sacred of callings, and he wondered if he should set his sights on being a great comedian or a great scriptwriter, but then the feeling passed, the sketch ended, some boring singer came on instead, and Benjamin knew that he was really just an ordinary teenager, an ordinary teenager in an ordinary family; even his grandfather’s face looked ordinary, after all, and Benjamin noticed for the first time that Lois hadn’t been laughing with them, and the sense of blinding clarity was gone, and once again everything in his life seemed fraught, complex and uncertain.

20

Benjamin awoke, opened his eyes, and noticed some peculiar things.

Firstly, opening his eyes had made no difference. He still couldn’t see anything. Secondly, he was in excruciating pain. His back ached and he had cramp in both legs but this was small fry compared to the pulsing, shuddering pain in his temples, which periodically spread out in waves of unmitigated agony, making him feel that his entire skull was enclosed in a slowly contracting vice. Thirdly, he could not move. His freedom of movement was restricted on all sides, apparently by four walls made of some sort of wood.

Finally, there was the most peculiar thing of all. He was holding something strange in his hand. An unidentified object. It was soft and fleshy and smooth, except at the nub where he could feel something harder and coarser, though still yielding. For the first few seconds of wakefulness he had no idea at all what it was. Then, when he had managed to free his hand and some of the sensation had started to return to his fingers, he began to explore the object further and discovered that it was attached to other objects which seemed more familiar and recognizable. A human collarbone, for instance, and a shoulder and an arm. Then he realised what the first object must be. It was a breast. A female breast!

Now a female voice let out a low groan in the dark next to him.

‘Ohhh,
shit
…’

There was the sound of a hand groping along the surface of the wood, and then the creaking of a door being pushed open, and then a rectangle of faint orange light appeared. Benjamin could now see out into a bedroom, lit dimly by the glow of a streetlamp, containing a double bed on which three half-naked bodies lay entangled beneath a pile of coats. It was not yet dawn. Benjamin began to remember where he was. This was Bill and Irene Anderton’s bedroom. They had gone away to Málaga for a winter break and Doug, left in charge of their house for the first time in his life, had taken the opportunity to have a party. It had got ever so slightly out of hand. The drinks cabinet had been opened and its contents devoured. Benjamin himself had drunk at least three-quarters of a bottle of vintage port. That much he could remember. And he could remember talking to this friendly girl with short red hair and a pale, freckly face. He had been talking to her about National Health and explaining how really it was the same band as Hatfield and the North only with a different bass player. She had seemed very interested. Remarkably interested, in fact. All the same, he was surprised to find that he had been sleeping with one of her breasts in his hand for the whole night. And what were they doing in Bill and Irene’s wardrobe?

Having opened the wardrobe door, the red-haired girl struggled to her knees and crawled out. She was wearing a full-length navy blue Laura Ashley party dress which was rolled down to her waist. Once she was standing up in the bedroom she realized that she had lost her bra and began to look around for it. Benjamin found it on the floor of the wardrobe – it was white and lacy – and handed it out to her, feeling gallant and embarrassed at the same time. She took it from him matter-of-factly and slipped it on. Then she pulled her dress over her shoulders, and Benjamin crawled out of the wardrobe and helped her to zip it up.

‘Thanks,’ she said, her voice husky with tobacco and alcohol. She pointed down at Benjamin’s flies, which were undone. He did them up. ‘Come on, let’s get out of here.’