Black Chalk (11 page)

‘But he knows what happened. I told him.'

‘Exactly.' She kissed my head and got up. I turned around, waiting for her to say more. She was pacing, two fingers playing with her lower lip.

‘Nate, he's just a policeman. He doesn't get how it works.'

As she walked around, unaware of my presence, I felt like a fool. I'd let myself hope too much, but she'd only come in so she could boast over one of her schemes. I suppressed the feeling as soon as it happened, but it had already coated my mind with a sticky dirt.

As she left the room, I tried to forget the smile she'd had when she'd walked in, and told myself to focus on practicalities. My mother was not being herself, I decided. But there was a weight on the insides of my stomach, as though I were falling, that stopped me from taking that line of thought any further. The only idea that seemed to fit was that I should take matters into my own hands. Whenever it came up, I nodded to myself and, for an instant, forgot the feeling in my gut.

***

In many ways, Eric had been unlucky when he first arrived at Hornsbury School. He'd spent his first weeks balancing the changes occurring within his home with his desire to fit in and make friends in a new school. There were days when he would be twitching around at his desk, hoping to start a conversation with his neighbours. I still remember him taking Jeffrey's seat next to me. Unhappy to see my friend relegated to the back, I spent the entire lesson ignoring Eric, just as he was trying to catch my eyes and smile. I feigned utter focus on my book, and when my attention wavered, I held my hand over my left eye so that our gazes wouldn't cross.

And there were days when he would trudge in, choose an empty table, and slump back, unaware of anyone around him. The strangeness of his behaviour could have worked for him. If Tom Davies or Anna, two popular students, had talked to him on one of his good days, they might have been inclined to feel for him on one of his bad days. Perhaps they would have gone and asked him how he was, and, touched, as he was still willing to be back then, he might have told them.

Instead, it became a bit of a sport to ignore him. Never something we openly discussed – we were friendly for the most part – but something jokes would refer to in passing:

‘I was struggling to stay awake, and then Eric sat next to me.'

But it could have blown over with everyone like it did with me. On one of his gloomy days, he tapped me on the shoulder and asked whether he could borrow my book for a second.

‘You don't have your own?'

‘Not anymore.'

I moved to his desk so we could share. We said hello to each other in the mornings after that, and I was soon enjoying the conversations we had on his better days. With a little luck, and I'm not asking for much, the same could have happened between Eric and the rest of the class.

The first I saw of the incident, Paul Cumnor was pushing Eric back onto a railing. It happened very quickly: Paul's head stuck into Eric's face, his finger jabbing Eric's cheek, and then Eric's head striking Paul, Paul collapsing to the floor with a thud and a ‘Fuck!', blood pouring from his nose, while Eric towered above him, a shallow cut across his forehead.

Eric told me the story later: he'd been staring in the distance, caught in his own thoughts, when he'd heard Paul calling to him. ‘Stop!' Unsure what Paul was referring to, Eric assumed he was telling him to stop brooding over his problems. He smiled at Paul, and soon slipped back into his world. At the end of the lesson, Paul drove into him: ‘Don't look at her!'

‘I could count the hairs on his chin,' he told me. ‘I had to hit him.'

Fights often bring people closer: there's something in fearing pain. But not this time: Eric was too absorbed in his own world. To those who didn't know him, he was shifty because he was guilty. Perhaps because he'd overcome Paul, Eric never blamed him for being ostracised. To him, everything was Tom's fault.

‘He's fake. He's always calculating. A smile here, a pretty speech there, and I'll get through! You saw him yesterday. He never talks to me and then he asks me if I want to be his lab partner. He just wants my help! So why does he go laughing behind my back? Chatting up Jayvanti while I do all the work.'

Even though I always found Tom's barbs innocuous, I would find myself agreeing with every word of Eric's rants. And, as Eric well knew, I would bump into Tom the next day and find him just as likeable as before Eric's outburst.

***

When my mother warned me that Hill would be coming back for a final interview, she added a note of hope:

‘It's almost over.'

Those three words became a mantra that I started to expect whenever I saw her coming out of a fog of thoughts. Pacing around the room, she said them as she saw me looking at her. After my father called, she said them as she explained that, once again, he had too much work to come and visit me. My dinner cooling on my lap, she said them as she bid me goodnight. At first I thought she was trying to reassure me and the words annoyed me, but then I realised that she was talking to herself.

They seemed stronger as she buttoned her jacket and went to open the door.

The woman who'd conducted the last interview entered the room first. She wore the same grey suit that she had the last time I saw her, its lines still embracing her figure. My eyes lingered on her waist as she closed the door. If I still felt my throat tighten, I also knew that she'd leave as soon as I told her what she was after.

‘Gina, will you get Mrs Dillingham some tea?' The inspector's voice came from the door.

Gina – this is the first time I remember her name – walked to my mother's side and whispered milk and sugar. She laid a hand on my mother's elbow.

‘I'll stay here,' my mother hissed. ‘Go and get it yourself.'

Exchanging a glance with her inspector, Gina swayed towards the door and left the room. That was the last I saw of her.

Andrew Hill loomed. The black wisps crowning his haggard face; the dark eyebrows settled at the bottom of his imposing forehead; the thick square glasses framing his brown eyes. He moved into the centre of the room with a ponderous walk, his feet settling a shoulder's length apart, his legs still as a plinth.

The inspector stood at the foot of the bed, while my mother stood to my right. A full minute elapsed from the moment he entered the room to the moment he started speaking. He removed his glasses.

‘Nate, you are an important witness. We need you to answer a few more questions. Can you do that for me?'

Feeling more comfortable with the process the third time around, I nodded confidently.

‘Good. Can you start by telling me about your friendship with Eric?'

As he mentioned ‘friendship with Eric', I felt my mother tensing next to me. I composed my face, and gave her an assured nod.

‘We were friends, but I was friends with everybody.'

The inspector's face had sallow skin lumped below his eyes. I looked closer and saw the same loose skin sagging from the lines of his jaw. Afraid to notice more, I let my eyes wander away.

‘His mother mentioned you visiting. How often did you visit him?'

‘How often?' The question brought up a string of visits all blending into one. ‘Every now and again.'

‘Well, let me rephrase the question. About how many times did you go to his house since, say, January?'

‘Ah…' Summer visits crowded my mind. I was seeing his tree-house and our conversations high above ground. Narrowing my focus to the winter months, I tried to think of the cold, of damp January afternoons, hoping it would bring the right visits to mind.

‘…Let me count, Nate,' my mother was saying, ‘since I had to drive you. There was that time before James' football training, and that was it. Before that was in December. Once, inspector.'

I felt Hill's eyes on me as my mother spoke.

‘Once, then?' he asked.

‘Once,' I said.

‘Alright. And do you remember seeing anything peculiar on that visit?'

My voice trailed off as my thoughts went back to Eric's shed. My bat was gripped in the vice on his workbench. He was bending forward and applying glue, creases spreading down his forehead. The smell of glue harrowed up my nostrils, but he didn't seem to mind it. I was glancing around, at the piles of sawn-off wood, at a canvas thrown over a heap, at a large metal box and a saw atop it.

‘His shed was messier than usual. But not very messy either. Maybe there was something.' I could feel my mother's breath as she leaned closer. ‘Maybe there wasn't. If I think about it long enough, I'm going to convince myself that there was.'

‘Nothing caught your attention?'

‘Nothing did then. But if I think about it long enough, I'll be telling you that I saw his guns and his bullets.'

Hill's hands rose to his head and stopped around his chin, wavering as he twirled his glasses.

‘Alright. One final question, Nate.' Suddenly, he was looking directly into me. ‘Why do you think Eric didn't shoot you like he shot everybody else?'

My mind reeled for a second. Through the white, I became aware of my hand cooped in my mother's, and I thought of my previous responses. I was ready to answer the question, even if haltingly.

‘I guess…' I was looking at the inspector, hoping to pick up cues from his body language. He remained solemn. ‘People either froze, or went for the door. I hid behind the teacher's desk. Thicker wood, and all that. And then I looked up, and I guess Eric was looking at me so I thought I'd go to him. He didn't want to die alone. That explains it, doesn't it?'

His eyes stayed fixed on mine, his mouth resolutely closed. It was when he put his glasses back on that I sensed he'd heard enough.

***

A squadron of suits was closing in on me. They were hiding behind the only column in the great cafeteria. I ran towards a slanted door, but it slipped ever further from my grasp. A blonde nurse in white bared her sharpened teeth and shook her head at me. When I asked her for help, she melted into the background. I could feel the men's moist breath on my neck. There was nowhere to run: I turned to face them.

It took me hours to fall back to sleep. The cold outside took its hold, my ward quietened, and the hospital crackled. With every thud, I imagined someone marching towards my door. With every crack, I imagined someone climbing up a window. Dawn came and went, and the hospital awakened. I let the bustle cradle me, nestling into its babble.

***

Beth was the only one of my remaining friends who visited me at the hospital. As we waited for my mother to bring us tea, she explained it all. Of course, she'd wanted to come earlier but one thing had led to another and she hadn't been able to. ‘Don't worry,' I said. Of course, it was the same with John, with Josh, with Jeremy. And when she called my home, she heard I wasn't well enough to receive a visitor yet. It was only because she'd seen my mother at a service in the morning that she'd managed to arrange a visit.

Beth had never been a close friend. Our groups, originally separate, had merged after the summer of 1999. More from a lack of opportunity than of affinity, we'd never spent much time together. I knew her best from what Jeffrey had told me. For the three months leading to the shooting, it seemed like every time we had a quiet minute, he told me another story about Beth. Once, a few weeks before Anna and I broke up, I told Anna what was happening between them, and she took it upon herself to organise a double date.

‘You invite Jeffrey, I'll take care of Beth,' she said.

She chose
The Sixth Sense
because it was meant to be scary.

‘Dead people. She'll jump into his arms,' she smiled in anticipation.

But Beth went to the bathroom while we chose our seats, and by the time I saw her, she'd come down the wrong aisle. She sat next to Anna, as far away from Jeffrey as she could be. Thankfully, the movie was good enough that we had something to talk about afterwards. When we left the cinema, I tried to pull Anna to my side, but we had to squeeze through a crowd, and Beth ended up alongside Anna. Jeffrey shrugged at me, and I shrugged back. Still, Anna wasn't going to give up: she took us to the canal and pulled out a half-full bottle of vodka. Three shots later, I was kissing Anna, and Jeffrey was leaning close to Beth.

‘It's going to happen,' Anna whispered in my ear. I looked at my friend and I thought the same.

The next day, Jeffrey and I were lounging in my room.

‘No, mate,' he said, ‘nothing. She left five minutes after you.'

‘My guess is that she's a lesbian,' I said.

He chuckled louder than me. I made many other guesses – she's scared of you, she thinks you don't like her (Anna's theory), she doesn't fancy you – but whatever I said, he always brought it back to the same thought: ‘No, it's more complicated than that. It's just…' he started and then, trying to work out what to say next, he trailed off, and then he smiled for he liked the way she made him suffer. He liked it even more when he felt that they were moving in the right direction – then he boasted about cricket, football, rugby, girls, about everything and anything that I could mention.

I was all smiles as Beth stood by my bed and explained her absence.

‘Don't worry,' I echoed, as she told me of her older sister needing the car, of buses not coming back late enough, of the flat tyre on her bike. The apologies only stopped when my mother came back with our teas.

Beth fell silent. My mother left and we were alone and Beth stayed silent. Her stillness was contagious. It was louder than her apologies. It was tightening my smile, and I needed to smile. I had to go for its source.

‘How is everyone doing?' I asked.

She looked startled, and, for a moment, I thought I was going to get back to Jeffrey's ebullient Beth. But then she smiled a sweet smile, an old smile.