Broken Voices (Kindle Single) (5 page)

Perhaps Mr Veal
sensed something of this. ‘There’s ratting up at Mr Witney’s.’

I looked up.
‘In his big barn?’

‘Yes — all
afternoon till the light goes.’

‘We could go,’
I said. ‘He wouldn’t mind, would he?’

‘More the
merrier. More than enough rats to go round.’

‘Ratting?’
Faraday said. ‘I’ve never done that.’

‘It’s ripping
fun,’ I said.

‘There are some
sticks in my shed if you want them,’ Mr Veal said. ‘Always best to take your
own. You want one the right weight, don’t you?’

Faraday was
reluctant but he wasn’t proof against my enthusiasm and Mr Veal’s gentle
encouragement. We found a couple of sticks and walked through the Porta. Angel
Farm was across the green, beyond the theological college.

‘Do we — do we
actually hit them? The rats, I mean?’

‘Of course we
do.’ I whacked the grass with my stick. ‘But you have to be quick. Or the dogs
get them first.’

‘You’ve been
ratting before?’

‘Loads of
times.’ I had been ratting only once, in fact, with the vicar’s son at home.
‘It’s awfully good sport — you’ll see.’

We turned into
the muddy drove to the farm. They had already started — I could hear the
shouting and the excited barking. To tell the truth, I was a little nervous.

‘Better put
your cap in your pocket,’ I said, taking mine off. ‘You might lose it
otherwise.’

My real reason
was that our caps advertised the fact that we were King’s School boys. The
school was not universally popular in the town, and there was no point in
courting trouble. Not that I was seriously worried. Mr Witney was a tenant of
the Dean and Chapter, and the school subleased their playing field from him; he
would keep an eye out for us.

Men and boys
were milling around the yard. The barn doors were open, revealing a space large
enough to take a laden wagon. Dogs were everywhere, small ones mainly, terriers
and the like.

‘That’s like
mine at home,’ I said, pointing at a mongrel with a lot of spaniel in him.
‘He’s awfully bright — understands almost everything I say.’

This was a lie,
as I did not have a dog. But I had pretended I had one for years. My aunt
wouldn’t let me have a real dog. It would bring mud into the house and,
besides, who would look after it in term time? So I had a dog in my mind
instead. The precise breed varied (he was often a mongrel) but his name was
always Stanley, after a dog my father had owned when he was a boy. The dog’s
other permanent attributes included his almost human intelligence and his
unswerving loyalty to me.

Mr Witney was
concentrating his operations both inside and outside the barn. The building was
very old, perhaps mediaeval in origin, and constructed of soft, crumbling
sandstone. The target areas lay along the base of one of the immensely thick
gable walls, both inside and out. Two or three men on each side were attacking
the ground with spades, iron rods and pickaxes, breaking up the compacted
earth. A score or so men and boys gathered around the diggers, all of them
armed with sticks. Dogs of all shapes and sizes scurried about everyone’s legs,
tails high in excitement.

Faraday and I
sidled into the outskirts of the larger crowd, the one outside the barn. Nobody
seemed to notice us. They were all staring at the diggers. Some of the dogs,
careless of danger, were diving into the loosened soil and burrowing like
maniacs with their front paws.

One of the dogs
was already so far into the ground that only his hind legs and tail were
visible. Suddenly he pulled himself out of a hole with a wriggling rat clamped
between his jaws. He shook his prey in the air, and two other dogs instantly
converged on him. One of them leapt up and grabbed the rat by its head. A tug
of war ensued, each animal trying to wrest the rat from the other until the rat
resolved the matter by dividing itself into two unequal parts.

I heard a sound
beside me and glanced at Faraday. His face had gone white, the fleeing blood
leaving a cluster of freckles scattered across the bridge of his nose and his
cheeks.

‘Come on,’ I
cried. ‘It’s—’

Another rat
broke cover and darted to and fro among the sticks and stamping feet and
snarling dogs. It saw an opening and shot towards the open field beyond. It was
making for the gap between Faraday and me. People were shouting. I swung the
stick down and felt the jar as it hit the ground, the impact running up my
hands and arms.

‘Well hit,
young ‘un!’ shouted Mr Witney. ‘That’s the way.’

I looked down
and saw to my surprise a little mass of bloodied fur, still squirming feebly.

‘Oh God,’
Faraday said.

A sort of
frenzy seized me, a bloodlust. I ran berserk among the men and boys and the
dogs and the rats. I held my stick in both hands and pounded it down, again and
again. One of the dogs attached itself to me. How many rats did I kill or help
to kill that day? Half a dozen, perhaps more?

Mr Witney put a
stop to the ratting only when the light was beginning to fade.

It felt as if
we had only been at the farm for five minutes but it must have been at least an
hour and a half. The dog rubbed itself against my leg. It was a mangy little
animal, a mongrel, with a piece of rope for a collar and a half-healed wound on
its side.

‘Well done, lad,’
Mr Witney said. ‘So you learn more than Latin and Greek at that school of
yours.’

I bent down and
scratched the dog between his ears. ‘Good boy, Stanley,’ I murmured. ‘Good
boy.’ Just for a moment I was blindingly happy, dizzy with joy.

Faraday nudged
my arm. ‘Can we go back now? Please?’

I looked at his
pale face and his big teeth, ghostly in the fading light, and all at once the
joy evaporated.

‘There’s blood
on you,’ he said. ‘There’s blood everywhere.’

He was right.
My hands were streaked with blood, some of it from the dog’s muzzle and some of
it from my stick. The corpses of rats lay everywhere, some complete, some in
fragments. The dogs’ interest in them diminished sharply once they stopped
moving.

‘Come on,’ he
said. ‘Please.’

I glanced over
my shoulder, hoping for a wave from Mr Witney or a nod of farewell from one of
my comrades in the battle. But no one was looking at me. No one paid any
attention when we left the yard and walked down the muddy lane towards the
green.

For a few
moments, for an hour even, I had been part of a group; I had played a useful
part; I had been, in some small way, valued for what I did. That was all gone.
Now I came to my senses and discovered that part of my collar had come adrift
from my shirt and the tip of it was nudging my left ear. My overcoat was
splashed with mud and cowpats, as well as blood. I had lost my cap. And I was
alone once more with Faraday.

‘They were talking
about me,’ he said in a voice that wobbled. ‘Mr Nicholls was there. He knows.’

‘Who’s
Nicholls?’

‘He is a lay
clerk. A tenor.’ For a moment there was a hint of superiority in Faraday’s
voice. ‘Not very good, though he thinks he is.’

The lay clerks
were the basses and the tenors of the Cathedral choir. They were grown-ups.
Many of them had been at the choir school when they were young, and they still
lived in the town.

‘What does it
matter if he recognized you?’

‘You don’t
understand.’ Faraday was always accusing me of that, and quite rightly. ‘Mr
Nicholls was pointing me out and whispering about me. They know.’

‘I expect it
was about your voice breaking and not being in the choir any more.’

‘No. You should
have seen their faces. They’d heard about... about the other thing.’

He meant the
postal order. If Mr Nicholls knew about it, the story could no longer be
confined to the Choir School and a handful of trusted outsiders like Mr
Ratcliffe. It would be all over the place in a day or two, in the College and
in the town.

‘I can’t bear
it,’ Faraday said.

I glanced at
him and saw a tear rolling down his cheek.

‘We’ll go back
to the Rat’s now,’ I said. ‘We can make tea. If there’s bread, perhaps we can
have toast. He’s got a toasting fork in the fireplace.’

‘Thank you,’ he
said, blowing his nose. ‘Thank you.’

Poor little devil. I was sorry for
Rabbit. I wanted to help, as long as doing so wouldn’t inconvenience me too
much. The question is: did trying to help make matters worse?

It was starting
to rain. In order to get back to the Sacrist’s Lodging as swiftly as possible,
I took us back through the Cathedral, which was not only shorter than by going
through the College or through the town but also, at that time of day, lessened
the chance that we should meet anyone who knew either of us.

My suggestion
wasn’t entirely altruistic: if a boy from King’s was found outside the College
without his cap, it automatically earned him a beating. It was possible that
the rule did not apply in the holidays, but I didn’t want to put it to the
test. Besides, I was starving, Mrs Veal’s lunch a distant memory, and the idea
of food was powerfully attractive.

Most people in
the College used the Cathedral for shortcuts, and so did many townspeople.
There were three doors open to the public — the west door under the great
tower, the south door, which led through the ruins of the cloisters to the
College, and the north door, from which a path led both to the High Street and
to the Sacrist’s Lodging. Using the Cathedral also meant you kept dry. It was
considered bad form to hurry, however.

We walked
through the porch and pushed open the wicket in the west doors. It was dark,
much darker, inside the Cathedral than it was outside. The lamps had not yet
been lit, apart from one or two at the east end, beyond the choir screen.

The emptiness
of the place enfolded us like a shroud. The air was cold and smelled faintly of
earth, incense and candles.

Ahead and to
the left, in the north aisle, was one of the great stoves, each surmounted by a
black crown, that were supposed to keep the building warm. There was a faint
but clearly audible chink as the coke shifted in its iron belly.

‘I’m freezing,’
Faraday said.

He walked over
to the stove and held his hands to it.

‘Hurry up,’ I
said. ‘I’m starving.’

‘Just a minute.
I’m so cold.’

I joined him by
the stove. If you stood about three inches away from it, you could actually
feel the warmth of it on your skin. It wasn’t so much that the stoves weren’t
occasionally hot: it was more that the Cathedral was eternally cold.

Faraday glanced
at me. ‘There’s blood on your hands,’ he said. ‘And on your sleeve.’ His voice
lurched into a croak. ‘It’s everywhere.’

‘Shut up,’ I
said. ‘It doesn’t matter. I can wash it off. What’s water for?’

I turned my
head to avoid seeing his white face and rabbit teeth. My eyes drifted away.
It’s a funny thing about buildings, how they take control of you and guide your
eyes along their own lines, towards their own ends. In the Cathedral, the
rhythm of columns and arches, diminishing in height as the layers climbed to
the roof, made you look upwards and upwards. Towards heaven, the school
chaplain once told us in a sermon. Or to the roof. Not that it matters in this
case: the point is I looked up into the west tower.

Its west wall
rises sheer, a cliff of stone pierced with openings; first the doors. Then
there is a great window which doesn’t let in much light because of the stained
glass. Then, higher still, bands of Norman arcading run across the inside of
the tower. The first set has a walkway that runs behind it. The next one,
further up, is blind, its arches and pillars flattened against the tower wall
behind. Above that still, 120 feet above the ground, is the painted tower
ceiling, above which the tower rises, higher and higher, stage by stage, to the
lantern that perches on top.

I knew a little
about the internal organization of the tower because sometimes one of the
younger masters would take a party of boys up to the top as a treat. You went
up a spiral staircase in the south-west corner, crossed the width of the tower
by the walkway behind the lower arcade, climbed another set of stairs, and then
another, until your legs felt like lead. Finally you came to a little wooden
door that led out to the very top of the tower, more than two hundred feet from
the ground.

Up there was
another world, full of light, where a wind was always blowing. You felt
weightless, as if floating in a balloon. Far below were the streets of the town
and tiny, fore-shortened people scurrying through the maze of their lives,
oblivious of the watchers above. Beyond the town stretched the Fens as far as
the eye could see, its flatness dotted with the occasional church tower or tree
or house, which served to emphasize their monotony rather than relieve it; and
at the circular horizon, the sky and the earth became one in a blue haze; and
it no longer mattered which was which.

I had been up
to the top of the west tower only once, about six months earlier before the end
of the summer term. It had been a bright, clear day. There was a story, the
master said, that a day like this you could see almost every church in the
diocese from here. I tried to count the churches I could see. But I soon gave
up and thought instead about Jesus in the wilderness, and how the devil took
him up to a high place and tempted him.

If I had been
Jesus, I would have struck a deal with the devil. In return for my soul I
wanted not to be at school; I wanted to live at home with my parents; and I
wanted to have a dog called Stanley.

I remembered
all that as I stood by the stove with my bloody hands. I was still thinking
about it when I saw the man. He was walking from left to right, quite slowly,
along the walkway behind the lower arcade, perhaps 90 feet above our heads. The
light was so poor I couldn’t see him clearly. When he passed behind one of the
pillars he seemed to dissolve and then reconstitute himself on the other side.