Dance On My Grave (12 page)

To present the court with a report which:

1. relates what we know about the case;
   
2. makes recommendations about
   what should be done next in dealing with Hal.
   

We agreed that the boy is not in danger and that this did not seem to be a case which, as far as I can judge, needs psychiatric or other treatment.

The only difficulty is that the client will not talk about what he has done.

We discussed my worries about having handled Hal badly so far. Sue thought those unfounded. But she suggested that I keep a more detailed Report and that she and I discuss my progress after each meeting. I agreed. I could not help feeling uneasy about the case and will feel better knowing Sue is keeping an eye on it with me.

19/I telephoned Barry from a box near home.

‘Great!’ he said. ‘Look, it’s busy here today. I can’t manage lunch. Come to the shop about five. We’ll fix up about your pay and stuff. Then we’ll celebrate. Okay?’

‘Okay, fine.’

There was a fog-horn noise in the background.

‘Hang on, Mother wants a word.’

‘Hal? Hello? This is me. You’re coming to join us! Barry told me. I’m ecstatic! I won’t have to serve all these awful children so much now. And such a friend for Bubby. You’re a godsend, you know that? But, Hal—are you there?’

‘Yes, Mrs Gorman.’

‘I have a bone to pick with you.’

‘A bone, Mrs Gorman?’

‘Last night. You promised me you’d not keep Bubby out so late. Four o’clock! That was naughty.’

‘Four o’clock?’

‘I know, I know! You’re young, you forget the time. I was young once myself. Mr Gorman used to keep me out dancing, dancing. Sometimes all night. What days! What nights! But you promised, Hal. Four o’clock, that’s too late when Bubby has to work next morning. You’ll find out when you are working here.’

‘I’m sorry, Mrs Gorman, I—’

‘Forget it, my darling. It’s nothing. Really. I must go. Bubby says I’m holding up business talking like this. He’s a slave driver, that boy. You’ll find out! Cheerio till we see you soon.’

‘Hal?’

‘Yes?’

‘I’ll explain tonight, okay?’

‘Okay.’

‘We’ll be great together, yes?’

‘Sure.’

‘Shalom.’

‘See you.’

20/I guessed what he had done. Gone back to The Drunk.

And I guessed right. He told me that evening when I got to the shop, which excitement is coming soon.

He tried to pass it off by lacing the story with jokes against himself. He’d felt uneasy leaving the poor goy (!) lying there with all that money because someone might happen along and rob him, or the taxi driver might come back and try again. So he’d gone back and sure enough someone was hanging about near The Drunk, so Barry woke him and stayed with him talking (?) till Our Friend sobered up enough to look after himself, etc. etc.

What he missed out of the story was probably as interesting as what he told. And he was like a kid who is a compulsive stealer of sweets trying to pass off his latest failure to resist temptation as a first-and-last-time affair, but knowing that nobody really believes him. Anyway, Barry was never any good at telling a story about anything not even a simple joke. And he had no memory either, which is something a good liar needs. He lived for the moment all the time, so memory was something he didn’t need.

I said nothing. Tried to laugh in the right places but couldn’t keep from looking squashed. It shouldn’t have mattered to me. If I’d thought about such a thing beforehand I would have sworn it wouldn’t have mattered to me. But it did. I guess, like the boys swearing eternal faithfulness to each other over the can of magic beans, I thought then that faithfulness was one of the things that was part of bosom palship. I expected it as an unspoken gift.

He couldn’t help but see my downcast feelings in my face. I guess that’s why he took me out on his motorbike: a kiddish way of trying to make everything right again by a breathless assault of madcap fun and frolics. Results also coming shortly.

I put the telephone down and stood outside the phone box for ten minutes chewing over what must have gone on. The more I thought about it, no doubt making it all far worse than it really had been, the deeper into depression I plunged. For a while I wandered round the streets chomping away in my mind at my distress. Surprising myself by my reaction. Kicking myself for feeling like this. And being completely stumped in deciding how to deal with Barry or myself. Lost, still, later, as Barry spun his yarn.

Now, weeks afterwards I still don’t know that I could
handle the same thing better. Maybe I wouldn’t feel so upset now, wouldn’t feel so betrayed. I’m harder now. I think. I hope. Maybe I’m also more tolerant of a friend being what he is and not what I want him to be.

But I guess one of the oddities about life is that you never really do learn from one experience how to cope with another. Because no two experiences are ever quite the same. You’re changed by what happens to you; but each new experience is just as hard to handle as the ones that went before.

21/Have you noticed how, if you get depressed, you start doing all the wrong things? And doing all the right things in the wrong way. You go from bad to worse, sucked into a vortex of deepening dismay.

That happened to me that afternoon. Thinking to distract myself and make some use of this wasted time, I went to school and saw Ms Tyke. Ms Tyke is my tutorial teacher, the one responsible for my ‘pastoral care’. That’s the phrase they use at school for the member of staff who is supposed to look after your personal interests—like whether you are feeling suicidal or bite your toenails or otherwise display signs of being human. The only thing having a person in charge of my pastoral care does for me is to make me feel like a sheep. Maybe it’s meant to. Anyway, Ms Tyke is about as pastoral as a cracking plant and as careful as a bulldozer. She believes the best way of countering male chauvinist piggery in a male-dominated society like England in general and Chalkwell High in particular—about which she waxes deliquescent at the drop of a male gender—is to adopt the worst excesses of male chauvinist piggery for herself, presumably on the theory that if you can’t beat them you should join them. I
guess she reckons that at least this way she gets her hormones back. Certainly you can be sure that whatever Ms T. says turns into Ms T.

I was foolish enough to put myself in her clutches that depressed afternoon because she was first in line of the bureaucratic hierarchy I had to navigate for careers advice and a decision about staying on in Ozzy’s English Sixth. Last in line was the Head. Four obstacles lay twixt he and me, viz: Ms Tyke; my year teacher; the careers officer; and the head of upper school. If all agreed with my hopes for my future, whatever those turned out to be, the Head would grant a two-minute rubber stamping interview. Otherwise return to Go. It has been known for a really determined applicant to succeed in a week, but the average time for this assault course is three weeks, so the sooner I started the better.

‘And what’s your problem?’ Ms T. said through her python grin as I entered her room. She yanked open a drawer in a filing cabinet, took out a thin buff file with my name on it, sat at her desk, waved me to a chair by its side.

‘I think I should see the Head,’ I said, hoping a full frontal attack might so take her by surprise I would get through to the top unhindered.

Her grin tightened and I knew I had blown it. As I say, when you’re depressed you can be sure you’ll do the wrong thing.

‘What can he do for you that I can’t do better?’ she said paring her nails with an unbent paper clip.

I hitched uncomfortably in my seat. ‘I’m thinking of staying on next year.’

A twitch of the eyebrows told me this announcement really had taken her by surprise. ‘I suppose I should feel pleased,’ she said. ‘What to do?’

‘English lit.’

‘Eng. lit.! Whatever put such a fool notion into your head, boy?’

Stung (wrong again; always stay cool) I said acidly, ‘
Whoever
actually, miz. Mr Osborn.’

‘That figures,’ she said, her grin turning down at the ends. ‘And is there some dark secret you’ve not so far revealed to me about the value of Eng. lit. in your future life? Or are you just into poetry and stuff?’

‘It interests me.’

‘It interests me too, but that’s no reason for staking your future on it. You’d be better off doing something useful.’

‘Isn’t literature useful, miz?’

‘No. Not like physics or chemistry or maths or medicine. The world needs people who know about things like that. Poets it might manage without.’

‘I’m not sure about that.’

‘Let’s not argue the point.’

An unforthcoming silence seemed the best reply.

Her eyes narrowed. ‘You’re not thinking of becoming a teacher, are you?’

‘No, miz.’

Evident relief. She grinned widely. ‘Thank God for that. Tell me, then,’ she went on with forced professional interest, ‘what do you hope to do with yourself? And don’t get excited, I only mean careerwise.’

‘
Careerwise
, miz?’

The semantic point evaded her. Or she pretended it did. ‘For a job,’ she said with heavy tolerance.

I affected rumination. ‘I don’t know.’

An as-I-expected nod. ‘You don’t know!’

‘Not sure.’

‘Not sure!’ Another rough going-over with her cold green eyes. She hitched in her chair, settling herself with her bare elbows sharp as marlin spikes on the desk.

‘Let me tell you something, Robinson.’

Clearly the news was not going to be happy. ‘What, miz?’

‘You are wet.’

This did wonders for my depression.

Nor had she finished. ‘Eng. lit. is just about your size. I expect you still weep over poetry.’ She scratched an armpit. Somehow an appropriate reflex, I thought. ‘I’ve been keeping tabs on you this last year,’ she said, tapping my file. ‘You’ve sloped around being useless most of the time. You don’t like games, you’ve hidden yourself away in the library whenever there was a vague chance you might get roped into house competitions. You’re antisocial. You’ve no initiative, no go at all. About all you’re good for as far as I can see is making smart-alec speeches at the Debating Soc. and writing twitty stuff for the school mag.’

A repeat performance of my unforthcoming silence seemed only further provocation.

‘What Mr Osborn sees in you I can’t imagine. Well, if he wants you he can have you. But don’t expect me to send up a favourable recommendation. In my estimation what you should have is a douche of cold reality. You need to find out what life is all about. A job would do wonders for you. Certainly, in my estimation the school won’t benefit from having you hanging about in it for another two years. There are better ways of spending the taxpayers’ money.’

I waited a minute to be sure she had finished and to give myself time to calm down. She had; I didn’t.

‘Is that all, miz?’

‘You want more?’ Her tight python grin returned. ‘Masochist. You’re like all the arty lot.’

The end-of-afternoon bell rang. Ms Tyke shuffled the few papers of my life together and closed the file. Stood up. Dropped the file into its drawer. Slammed the drawer.

‘Okay,’ she said, standing by the desk swinging her car keys from a finger. ‘Come see me again if you change your mind.’

I went and stared at the sea.

22/‘The sea is
rather
fine, don’t you think?’

She was sitting behind me on the low wall that separates the beach from the esplanade just below Chalkwell station. I turned and saw small feet with painted toenails, slim legs in hugging blue jeans, a red T-shirt tight over unobtrusive breasts, a small triangular face, short cropped blonde hair. She stretched out ‘rather’ in a way that betrayed she was not English, like it was an elastic band.

I nodded. Turned back to the sea.

She slipped down onto the sand beside me.

‘You don’t mind I should talk to you I hope?’

Usually I don’t like talking to strangers: the inconsequential polite natter of the unattached. But sometimes, like now, when people you know have given you a pain in the mindgut, it is a relief to come across someone you don’t know who wants to talk. Wants to prattle about nothing. Inconsequentiality then is even comforting.

‘Talk away,’ I said.

‘It is for my English,’ she said, raised her eyebrows—pretty eyebrows, brown, like a pencil line—and nodded her head from side to side. ‘I am rather rusty.’

‘You’re doing very well.’

‘You think so?’ She smiled widely. ‘I am pleased. I only arrived two—three days ago.’

‘Where are you from?’

‘Norway. My name is Kari.’

‘Hello, Kari. I’m Hal.’

She shook hands, a comic formality sitting on seaside sand.

‘Hal?’

‘Short for Henry. I don’t like Henry.’

‘Hal is nice. I like it
very
much.’ She elasticated ‘very’ also. ‘Southend I like too,’ she said smiling approval at the Thames and settling herself comfortably. ‘It is quite jolly.’

‘You’ve been to England before?’

‘Once. That time at Birmingham.’ She pulled a bad-smell face. ‘Birmingham is not so jolly as Southend.’ We laughed. ‘I think I shall sun bath if you don’t mind.’

‘Be my guest,’ I said. ‘And it’s sun
bathe
.’

She cross-arm gathered the hem of her T-shirt in her hands and hauled upwards. ‘Sun
bathe
,’ she said, pulling the shirt over her head. ‘Thank you. Please correct my wrong speech. I learn best that way.’

‘You’re doing great,’ I said assessing her litheness, the small breasts scarfed in a haltered slip of red cloth, her sleek tanned skin.

In a neatly flicking unzipping movement she sloughed her jeans. A daring nappy of cloth curtained her crotch and arrowed the eye down the flow of her trim legs.

I needed to swallow a lot.

‘Wouldn’t you like to sunbathe too?’ She lay back flat on the sand, pillowing her head on her bundled clothes. ‘You must be hot in your clotheses.’

‘Clothes,’ I said, just managing.

‘Silly me,’ she said, chuckling. ‘Always, I get that wrongly.’

I looked at my watch. ‘I have to meet someone soon.’