Different Class (9 page)

Fiction? Well, you can’t build a School on theories and think-tanks. A good schoolmaster knows that, and cuts his cloth accordingly. In the old days, we knew how to deal with the baser element. We didn’t need a policy to tell us bullying was wrong, or that boys should be polite, and try to behave like gentlemen. There were no charters, no workshops, and certainly no abuse gurus – just a single Latin phrase that covered all eventualities.

In loco parentis.
It used to mean ‘act as a reasonable parent does’. Now hardly anyone knows
what
it means. And besides, most parents nowadays are anything but reasonable. Instead they are litigious, entitled, gullible, defensive, rude and obsessed with getting their money’s worth. As the new Headmaster says: no longer parents, but
customers
.

Most St Oswald’s customers will love the New Head for all the reasons I do not – his charm, his youth, his oratory, his effortless use of jargon. For myself, I’d like to see him deal with a riotous fifth-form class last thing on a Friday afternoon, but I doubt I ever will. Men like Johnny Harrington never have to roll up their sleeves or get chalk dust on their hands. Men like Harrington sit and make plans while others follow orders. And men like Harrington know how to set other men in motion; winding the mechanism, pulling the strings, setting them off in directions they
think
they have chosen for themselves—

At long last, the Briefing was over. The Head and his Crisis Deputies went off to discuss the master plan over tea and biscuits in the Head’s inner sanctum. I know that sanctum very well; the last Head left it exactly as old Shitter Shakeshafte did, except that the smell of cheese has been replaced by the scent of floral air-freshener. Bob Strange followed them like an expectant basset hound, leaving the rest of us to compare notes around the tea urn. Kitty Teague passed me a biscuit.

‘So. What do you think?’ I said.

Kitty gave me the kind of smile she reserves for her slowest pupils. ‘He seems very pro-active,’ she said. ‘I think he’ll be good for St Oswald’s. We needed a bit of a shake-up after everything that happened last year.’

‘
Pro-active
. Isn’t that a kind of yoghurt?’

She said: ‘You don’t sound very convinced.’

‘I don’t think he’s the man for the job.’

‘Why? Because he’s too young? Or because he’s not from a teaching background?’

Well, come to think of it, those are both excellent reasons for mistrust. St Oswald’s is an old ship, requiring careful handling. One does not put an old ship in the hands of the cabin boy. Besides, although I have no doubt as to Harrington’s competence in the field of Public Relations, a
real
Headmaster comes from the ranks; he serves his time at the chalk-face; he learns from ugly experience; he gets blisters on his hands. This new generation of Headmaster is a different class; computer-literate; personable, politically correct and in touch with the new methodologies – but unless he has
taught
, how can he expect to understand what we do here? How can he understand the boys? How can he understand the
staff
?

‘I don’t know about that,’ Kitty said. ‘Everything’s moving so fast now. We need someone to take control, to help us compete in a changing market. I think he’ll be good for all of us, Roy. St Oswald’s needs a human face.’

A human face? Johnny Harrington? Gods, am I the only one he
hasn’t
managed to seduce?

I noticed Kitty was wearing a suit for the first time since I’ve known her. That’s what promotion does, I suppose. I shouldn’t hold it against her. Kitty, at thirty-five, is still young, with a promising future ahead. Chances are she knows nothing of what happened here twenty-four years ago. Dr Devine is different. I expected more of him. And Eric – he was there from the first, much as he would like to forget, and those who will not remember the past must be condemned to repeat it.

But maybe I shouldn’t be too harsh on my colleagues, or on myself. None of us saw the crisis approaching, back in that autumn of ’81. None of us guessed how everything would spring from that first, improbable seed, like a chain of paper flowers pulled from a circus-master’s hat and blooming gaudily over the years to flower again on a dead man’s grave . . .

7

Michaelmas Term, 1981

Dear Mousey,

It wasn’t always like this, you know. I didn’t always have to pretend. My dad wasn’t always this pompous, and sometimes my mother used to smile. But then we had Tribulation. That’s what they call it, Mousey, with the capital letter. Tribulation is what God sends when He thinks you’re not paying attention. It can be cancer; or locusts; or boils. It can be an accident. Or he can take something away. A precious possession; the use of a limb; even, in some cases, a life.

What God took was my brother.

His name was Edward, but Mum and Dad always called him Bunny. I was seven years old when he died. In fact, he was the reason I got sent to school in the first place. Till then, Mum had looked after me at home, but after my brother was born, she decided that she couldn’t look after two children at once. And so I was sent to Netherton Green, while Mum looked after Bunny.

I didn’t want to go to school. Netherton Green was noisy, and big, and filled with other children. I didn’t like other children much. They frightened me a little. So when I arrived, I didn’t speak. I barked like a dog for the first three days. I figured people liked dogs. I thought it would make them like me. Turns out it made me a weirdo. I’ve been a weirdo ever since.

They never told me exactly what happened to Bunny. Perhaps they thought I was too young. All they said was:
God took him
. Other people told me the rest. Bunny had been having his bath. My mother had gone to answer the phone. She’d only been gone a minute. Bunny was nearly two by then. He drowned in six inches of water.

I think that’s when I first started to really be afraid of God. If He could take Bunny, then He could take me. And worse, my parents talked about it like it was a kind of treat, like maybe going to Disneyland. Except that sometimes, I could hear Mum crying in her room, and at Church I heard Mrs Plum say to Mrs Constable that Mum was no better than she should be, and that maybe now she’d understand that God doesn’t play favourites.

Mrs Constable didn’t like my parents, because Dad had told some people at Church that Mrs Constable’s daughter was living in sin with a woman in Leeds. After that, Mrs Constable didn’t talk to my parents at all, and Mr Constable started a Gay Families Support Group, which Dad said was a gateway to approving immorality. I was a bit young to understand, but Dad explained that being gay was wrong; that it was in the Bible. Of course, that was in the olden days. Now it’s not even illegal. How can that be? Did the rules change? And if they did, what happened to the people who went to Hell for being gay? Do they get a free pardon? Or do they just have to stay there?

At lunchtime today the three of us went up to Mr Clarke’s room again. Mr Clarke –
Harry!
– was marking books. That’s what he does most lunchtimes. The boys in his form either go to lunch, or play football in the Quad, or go to the fifth-form Common Room, or stay in and eat their sandwiches, listening to records. Sometimes Harry lets you choose. Sometimes he chooses something himself.

At first I wanted
Animals
. Goldie was already eating his lunch. Poodle didn’t say anything, but just gave him his usual look, like a dog expecting a biscuit.

Harry looked at me, then took a record sleeve from the box and said: ‘I thought I’d play you a classic today. Something tells me you’ll like it.’

The album was called
The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars
. It was by David Bowie. I didn’t know much about him, though I’d seen his pictures in magazines. He’s the kind of singer that my dad despises most of all, and that Mr Speight thinks is the devil incarnate. Hair like a girl. Face like a girl. Eyes like a kind of demon. Of course, my dad makes Mr Speight look sane when it comes to demons. He’s like a sniffer dog that can sense evil. Or so he thinks. If only he knew what demons were here, hidden away right under his nose.

I wanted to look at the album sleeve, but Harry had put it aside. He dusted the record with a cloth, then checked the record player. He’s always very careful like that, making sure it’s on the right speed and the needle’s free of dust.

I sat down next to the teacher’s desk. Goldie and Poodle sat next to me. The others opened their lunch boxes. I’d swapped one of my sandwiches for Goldie’s chocolate biscuit, and my Wagon Wheel for Poodle’s pork pie. But somehow it didn’t seem right to eat while Harry was playing his music. Harry had chosen that record for me. I owed it to him to listen. And then the music started, and I mostly forgot about eating. All I could think of was the way the music seemed to fold around me like a hand and finger its way into my heart.

I don’t know too much about instrumentation: I could hear some sax, and some graunchy guitars, and some keyboards, and some voices – or was it all the
same
voice? – telling a story that I knew from somewhere, maybe out of a dream. It was amazing. It was immense. It was the biggest, most powerful thing that had ever happened to me. I sat there, holding my biscuit, listening to the music, hardly even daring to breathe. Goldie ate his sandwiches. Poodle was drawing in the margin of his Prep diary. Neither of them seemed to have realized the awesomeness of what they had just heard. To them it was just music. To me it was like a door in my mind opening into another world.

‘Can we play it again, sir?’

Harry was still marking books. When I spoke, he looked up and smiled. ‘Hadn’t you ever heard it before?’

‘My dad doesn’t like rock music.’

‘It’s not just the music. It’s the vibe. In fifty years’ time, they’ll remember this.’

I looked at the album cover then, which showed Ziggy, standing with his guitar on a street corner at night under a sign that said: K. WEST. It was a painting, not a photo, and you could see the way the artist had picked out the bricks in the wall and the rain shining on the pavement. There was a pile of litter and old cardboard boxes in the foreground; it looked seedy and exciting and dangerous all at the same time. And although he was the star of the show, Ziggy looked small in the picture, standing outside a closed door, with all the lights in the windows shining yellow and welcoming, and him outside, alone in the rain, getting wet and not giving a damn.

It struck me then that Harry looks a little bit like Ziggy. Older, of course, and with glasses. Ziggy with experience.

In fifty years’ time, I’ll remember this
.

That would make me sixty-four. Six years to go till I’m seventy. Funny, how death steps into my mind, even at the best of times, like a dog that won’t stay away. Still, I knew that Harry was right. I’ll remember this moment till I die.

‘I wish life was like a record, sir. I wish we could start all over again.’

He put down the pen he was using. ‘Why?’

‘Well, sir,’ I said. ‘Because it feels it’s all going by too quickly. Like there’s no time to get it right. Like it’s all been decided, and there’s nothing we can do to change.’

I felt a bit embarrassed then. I hoped I didn’t sound like a spaz. (It
was
a spazzy thing to say.)

But Harry wasn’t laughing. He said: ‘Life is a gift from the universe. We’re all of us free to do what we want. We can all be who we want to be. We can all change, if we want to change. All it takes is courage.’

‘Courage,’ I said.

‘That’s right.’ That smile. His eyes go Chinese when he smiles. ‘A little courage is all it takes. After that you can be free.’

‘Do you really believe that, sir?’

‘Of course I do,’ he said. ‘Don’t you?’

8

September 7th, 2005

Word in the Common Room so far is that the New Head is sound. Dr Devine is too dignified to share his views with the hoi polloi. Eric is also lying low. His shameful, toadying applause in the wake of the Headmaster’s speech means that he is avoiding me. But everyone else is already sure that Harrington will be good for us. Dr Burke, the Chaplain; Bob Strange; Robbie Roach, the hopeful historian, who still hasn’t quite recovered from the exhilarating prospect of Mulberry girls in the School. Of course, Roach is an idiot; Strange, a management toady; and the Chaplain lives in a world of his own where reality seldom penetrates – but I’d thought that Eric, at least, would show a little loyalty.