Acid Song (4 page)

‘Fuck off!’ Loud, angry. Every eye opened in time to observe the half second between intent and action. Sean eyeballed Lionel. He was only half Lionel’s size, but his eyes burned dark and there was spit at the corner of his mouth. Lionel raised his eyebrows in invitation, his head pivoting back on his neck, jeering. For half a second.

The first blow, a close-fisted punch, caught Lionel on the chin. The second, a furious, optimistic swing, was blocked by the larger boy. Knees and elbows flew. A ball of desperate rage, repelled by a wall of solid violence. Sean screamed, flailed, erupted. Lionel, far more practised and efficient, chose his moments. A sickening blow took the wind out of Sean’s stomach, a needless addition broke the smaller boy’s nose.

Sean was snorting blood as they pulled him off, its vivid red splattered across a face of snot and tears. Small, careful, studious Sean: turned, just like that. Turned and suffering. Lionel towered over him, hands held out as if in complete innocence. His shirt was ruffled, but floating above it his smile was serene and his eyes shone,
an animal too, not beaten but high. Wanting more.

Mr Krane stood between them, fighting to catch his breath. He paused as if he was looking for something. A mood perhaps.

‘Sean, come with me. Lionel, Mr Chalmer’s office.’

‘But I didn’t fucking do anything.’

Lionel stepped forward, closing the gap between himself and his teacher, accentuating the difference in size. Mr Krane stared back impassively.

‘Well that’s clearly not correct is it?’

‘You saw.’

‘Yes Lionel, I saw.’ Mr Krane’s face was blank, as if this was all too stupid, too predictable, to waste his life on.

‘So a little fucking white guy’s never in the wrong?’ Lionel challenged.

‘You want to accuse me of racism, Lionel, feel free to lay a complaint.’

‘With who? The white principal?’

Now at last there was a reaction from the teacher. Nothing much, just the smallest hint of a smile.

‘Yes, Lionel. Your life is the end product of a vast racist conspiracy. That is why you hit people. You are a victim. Please accept my sympathy. Now get to the deputy principal’s office.’

Lionel thought about hitting him. Sophie saw the careful calculation in his eyes. The numbers fell and he reluctantly turned, ambling towards the door.

‘And don’t go anywhere else on the way!’

Lionel raised a single finger in staunch salute. Mr Krane looked down at Sean’s beaten face.

‘And don’t you expect any sympathy either. What the hell were you thinking?’

It was, Sophie realised, the stupidest of questions. You only had to take one look at the boy’s eyes, dull and empty, watch the rapid
rising and falling of his chest, or see the flaring of his crusted nostrils, to know he hadn’t been thinking anything. Surely a biology teacher didn’t need to be told that. There had been rage and now, in a slow tide of realisation, there was shame. The victim stood gingerly in a drunkard’s daze, hunched over as if his stomach was contracting, pulling him forward. A thick line of blood stretched down from his nose, its slow motion descent breaking into three neat drops which splashed onto the carpet.

‘GET CLOSER,’ AMANDA instructed. ‘We need the anger.’

In her mother’s album the activists always looked so relaxed, certain the world would tumble at nothing more than a gentle nudge and the strum of a guitar. Maybe it was the way the sun was always shining in the photographs, or her mother’s face, simultaneously eighteen and fifty at the centre of every frame, but it had all seemed so harmless.

Today’s protesters were dressed for battle, coats pulled high against the cold of the southerly which had swept in as forecast to announce the onset of afternoon. The faces in the crowd were pulled small and grim, eyes too tight for optimism, bit actors playing their small but necessary roles in the war that never ends. No longer the adventurers setting out to conquer new lands; now the defenders left at home to guard the castle, to forever fight off the gathering hordes.

‘One, two, three, four.’ The chant emerged tinny from the megaphone and was treated with disdain by the ripping air. ‘We don’t need no racist bores! Two four six eight, ignorance must lead to hate.’

There was a decent gathering; not large, but passionate. The number of students on their way from cafeteria to library who paused to watch, and puzzle over the more obscure placards (‘IQ for who?’ ‘You can’t measure shade’) made it hard to get an accurate fix on numbers. Fifty or so made up the hard core, Amanda estimated. They had been out here all morning, and were promising to do the same every day until the object of their rage, William Harding, Professor of Psychology, did the decent thing and resigned. His public pronouncements to date suggested that it would be a cold day in hell before such a thing happened, and right now the southerly was doing its best to oblige. Amanda was filming in the hope that she might later trap Richard into commenting. He had remained resolutely silent on the issue, which seemed to Amanda to be oddly out of character, and therefore a puzzle worth probing.

‘How much footage do you want?’ Greg asked her.

‘Can you pull back and up and get a focus on his office window?’

‘Which one’s his office?’

‘Just a window that looks as if it might be his will do.’

‘Hold on a sec.’

Greg planted his feet wider and practised the move a couple of times before he was happy.

‘Okay, think I got it. Any faces you particularly want to …’

He was interrupted by the sudden movement of the crowd. It was like watching a flock of birds in flight: impossible to say exactly where the lead came from. Suddenly, the mass was moving as one, swarming towards a door.

‘It’s him!’ The air was filled with boos and hisses. For a comical
moment the protesters were deprived of the confrontation they longed for by the fact that they were now blocking the doorway through which the professor sought to emerge. It took a complicated series of Chinese whispers and clumsy backing up before the drama could resume.

Amanda and Greg followed their instincts and skirted around the side, anticipating this would be the hounded academic’s escape route. Within a moment he was stopped in front of them, caught between the impassive lens and the baying crowd. For a representative of Lucifer, Professor Harding was disappointing. He wore a sensible, unsurprising brown jacket over a blue-buttoned shirt. What was left of his sandy hair was unkempt and easily tempted into dance by the wind. He was the sort of man it was easy to imagine standing in a park somewhere, smiling as he watched his children playing on the swings. He hesitated, as if too polite to simply push past the camera, and after running his hand through his kinetic hair, sighed and turned to face his accusers. Perhaps he was hoping they would give him an opportunity to speak.

‘Racist!’ cried one.

‘Bastard!’ another, before chants of SHAME, SHAME, SHAME drowned out the individual contributions.

‘Just let him through,’ Amanda shouted in Greg’s ear. Greg took a step back, but a short wide woman alert to the opportunity was too fast for them. She bounded up the single step marking the beginning of the quad’s amphitheatre and stood in the space vacated by the cameraman, effectively putting the shrinking professor on the stand.

Sensing a new twist in their interactive drama, the protesters quietened, compressing from the back like a crowd at a rock concert. There was fear now, in Professor Harding’s eyes. Amanda felt something similar rising in her throat. She scanned about for sign of a security guard, a policeman, or even a grown-up. Someone who
could stop this ending badly. There was only her and Greg.

The spokesperson raised her hand and the last of the murmuring flattened out. Even still she had to shout to be heard above the wind.

‘Professor Harding, are you prepared to publicly apologise for and retract your statements made in the
Journal of Psychology?’

Amanda watched the faces in the crowd, their necks craning as they peered at this vision of evil.

‘Ah, well, I was just on the way to the library actually, I haven’t come prepared for a, ah, for this…’

His voice was small and he looked to the ground as he spoke: whether a function of circumstance or habit she couldn’t say.

‘We can’t hear you!’ someone shouted.

Another added ‘racist!’ and laughter spread through the crowd.

At this the professor raised his head again. Amanda caught a glimpse of tears in his eyes.

‘I am categorically not a racist.’ The hounded man raised his voice now, his reedy version of shouting betraying his emotion. ‘I have explained as carefully as I can that all I …’

But they didn’t want to know. What good could knowledge possibly do, when they had such tightly drawn feeling to call upon?

‘APOLOGISE, APOLOGISE, APOLOGISE.’

The professor, realising his mistake in attempting to engage, tried to continue on his way towards the library. This involved making his way around his inquisitor, who in turn attempted to block him by moving into his path. But the man was looking down, drawing the blinds on this ugly world, and the collision gave the woman the excuse she needed to stagger backwards, as if the contact had been deliberate.

It was an older man with years in the business who provided the next spark. He grabbed at the professor’s collar, as if to pull him off, although it was clear no such restraint was necessary. In fact, so little
resistance did he offer that he and his assailant were both thrown off balance, stumbling backwards over the low step and sprawling at the feet of the mob.

And then the kicking started.

To be fair to the crowd, some people even tried to pull back the worst offenders, but nevertheless the result was vicious. Blows to the back, the head, wherever a boot could be landed. The poor man crumpled, frail and defenceless. Amanda had no choice.

‘Get off him! Get back, you fucking animals! Get back!’

She pushed her way forward, arms out, shoving at anything solid, screaming so hard she felt the tearing of her voice.

They stopped suddenly, perhaps as shocked by their actions as Amanda was. She felt a knot forming in her too-dry throat, and her chest rising and falling as she gasped for air. Greg was standing beside her, his glare as furious as her own, the extra height making him all the more threatening. There was a moment then of absolute quiet; even the wind made a space for the descending shame. Amanda crouched and helped the poor man to his feet.

‘Are you all right?’ she asked. Blood dripped from his brow. He nodded his thanks, but did not meet her eye. She had hold of his arm, supporting him, and felt his body shaking.

‘We have a car out the front, if you’d like us to …’

‘No, no, I’m fine.’

He turned away and hunched against the wind, scurried back to the door from which he had emerged. Already the crowd was dispersing, splitting off to regather the strands of their stories, to make sense of this. Most of them. A small core remained with their placards, apparently unmoved by the incident.

‘What?’ The woman who had assumed leadership suddenly shouted into Amanda’s face. Amanda realised she had been staring. At the edge of her vision, she was aware Greg had the camera back on his shoulder.

‘Are you going to apologise to him?’ Amanda asked, the only thing she could think of.

‘What for? The fuck got what he deserved.’

Behind the pugilist someone nodded their assent.

‘That’s barbaric,’ Amanda told the woman, taking in now the small blue eyes quivering with righteous certainty.

‘So you’re defending the racist? Is that why you’re here? What are you, fucking television?’

‘We’re making a documentary, on Richard Bradley, to mark the anniversary.’

Richard was, amongst these people, something of a hero. These people. Amanda’s people; although right now the fit felt tight and clammy.

‘You should know better.’

‘That was assault.’

‘Have you read the article?’

Amanda nodded. She had skimmed it. IQ tests. It seemed that no matter what opinion you had on the things, it would always be controversial. And Professor Harding had an opinion. He had conducted a systematic statistical analysis on all the reputable data he could find and his conclusions were unpalatable. No matter what allowances he made for other factors – income level, social status, gender, language bias, educational experience – he claimed he found a residual effect which correlated strongly with race. Which is to say different races may have different types of brains. His conclusion, as Amanda had read it, was not so bald. Rather he suggested that the data demanded this hypothesis at least be investigated. But there are some investigations which can not be proposed. For such proposals invite beatings.

‘Yes, I have.’

‘And were you disgusted?’ the woman asked, although it was less a question than a demand.

‘I think,’ Amanda replied, certain only of her disgust for the woman in front of her, ‘that in the end I would defend his right to say it.’

‘And you would have defended Hitler’s right to free speech too, I suppose,’ the woman responded.

It was all so ridiculous, life’s mystery reduced to slogans. ‘Hitler’s thugs formed mobs, and beat the defenceless. That’s how the terror started.’

The woman spat a warm, solid glob of saliva straight into Amanda’s face.

‘You disgust me,’ were the protester’s final words. Amanda, wiping the retort from her cheek, turned away.

RICHARD BOARDED THE lift. There was a time when it had been a matter of pride to take the stairs. He felt the world drop away beneath him. Down through the institute of molecular biology, where the Ph.D. students he supervised did their lab work. Past the maths floor, which occasionally he was forced to visit, to have the latest parsimony models explained. Nothing could so consistently make him feel young again – grey of shorts, bony of knees, brim-full of ignorance – than talking to today’s mathematicians. There had been a time when this was his domain, but he had become distracted by the demands of his career, and now he needed them.