Engleby (10 page)

I never thought of complaining to old Talbot about what was going on because it would have sounded feeble. ‘They won’t talk to me . . .’ Well, why should they? ‘They wreck my room . . .’ Don’t tell tales. ‘Wingate . . . He . . . You know – on my bed.’ Don’t be disgusting.

Since the head of the house and the prefects were all in on the deal, it was in any event semi-official. Why would Mr Talbot take the word of a new boy who said ‘toilet’ against that of the boys he had himself nurtured and promoted?

His report at half-term proved me right. ‘Michael seems to be uncomfortably aware of his own precocity and must be careful not to ruffle feathers in the house.’ My mother said, ‘What’s precocity?’

Sometimes I hid in the bathroom, where Sidney, the disreputable cleaner, took his tea break. Sidney threw a pile of tea leaves into the corridor each morning and swept up the dust with a moulting broom. He was about sixty, with muscular, tattooed forearms, a former corporal in some supply regiment, though evasive about how much ‘action’ he’d seen.

The problem was that by being there one became a captive audience for his foul stories. One day I found myself in an audience of two (Batley was the other, though I don’t know why) sitting on the duckboards at his feet.

‘This bird,’ Sidney began, ‘when I was on leave and we was gettin’ on pretty well, and I rolls on top of’er, see, and she says to me, “Ooh, Sid, you mustn’t do that,” and I says to’er, “I’ll just put the end in, all right?” and she says, “All right, Sid,” so I gives’er a thorough good seein’-to and when I’m done, she says to me, “Ooh, Sid, you said you’d only put the end in,” and I says, “Yeah, I know, but I didn’t say
which
end.”’

He laughed until he made himself cough for a minute or so before resuming. ‘Another thing. I’ll tell you what. The average length of a woman’s twat is nine’n’ a half inches. The average length of a man’s prick is seven.’

‘Really, Sid?’

‘Yeah. That means that in Britain alone there’s almost a hundred and fifty miles of spare layin’ around, so—’

‘Gosh, Sidney, that’s an awful lot of spare t—’

‘So make sure you gets your fair share.’

Batley and I were arranged like the figures in
The Boyhood of Raleigh
, but I don’t suppose that this was quite what Millais’s old salt was telling his boys. Though on second thoughts, I suppose with old sailors you never know.

In the holidays, I forgot about Chatfield. From the moment I got back into the house in Trafalgar Terrace, I put it from my mind. I’ve always been able to do that, to make as though things aren’t really happening. When you look back at what you’ve been doing for the last half an hour, for how much of the time have you really been aware of it? When you drive a car, for instance, you’re not aware of the functions that your brain and hand and eye are performing at eighty miles an hour, skilled movements that save you and others from death. You’re thinking about something else altogether. The music on the radio. What you’re doing next Tuesday. You’re having an imaginary conversation with someone. We’re not really conscious of what we’re doing most of the time.

As we entered the final week of the holidays, though, a dry taste came into my mouth. I couldn’t sleep.

When I went back to Collingham, I wrote a lot of letters to my mother and some to Julie. My mother wasn’t much of a correspondent. She was busy at the hotel and it became clear that writing to me was just one more chore in her busy day.

So, ‘Dear Julie,’ I might write instead, ‘How’s things? I’ve been doing Latin, which is the story of what the Romans did. They were early Italians who conquered other countries. Know the waiter in the Oasis Café near the cinema? He’s a Roman. I’m having fun here. I have this game in my room with some socks rolled up in a ball. I try to kick them against a spot on the brick wall of my room. I have different teams, like the Animals against the Birds. You get points for how close you get. I write down the scores on a piece of paper. Starling is very good but Zebra is
no good at all
. Write to me, Jules. Tell me anything. Tell me about your friends at school and what you’ve been doing. Love, Mike.’

It was strange to see my name written down like that. It was weeks since I’d heard it. ‘Mike.’

After about eight letters of mine, I got three pencil lines. ‘dear mike, me and jane plad with her cosens. We had wimpey for tee, love juliexox.’ I didn’t even know she could write.

And at least I read it before it was intercepted. I gave the letter fag two shillings not to call out my name, so Baynes wouldn’t be alerted. I stole the two shillings from a jacket in the changing room, but I didn’t know whose it was so I didn’t feel bad about it.

I began to steal quite a bit after that. It was useful, and it had a good effect on my morale. I was extremely careful and never took notes, just coins that would be hard to trace, and only small sums, never more than five bob at a time. Once, when I was on changing room sweeping-up duty, I saw Baynes’s brown tweed jacket unattended on its hook. I was the last one there and I knew Baynes was doing extra rugby practice until it was dark. There was a pound note in the inside pocket. It was very, very tempting, but I put it back. The one thing I had over Baynes was that I was cleverer than he was. That was an advantage I couldn’t afford to blow. For all I knew, it was a plant and he’d noted the serial number.

Of course, it might have given him a dilemma if I’d been caught because I would have been expelled and that would have been a disappointment to him and Hood and Wingate, having no one to torment. But I guessed he would have found a way of not reporting it and of making my punishment more ‘informal’.

One of Baynes’s favourite tricks was to send me to do a rubbing from a brass engraving in a church a couple of miles away. You were given 25 minutes to change into sports clothes and get there and back, which was impossible, but meant that he could send you again. He only sent me in the first place if it was raining, so the piece of paper was always wet and spoiled and he could question whether I’d even got there.

I used to peer into the raspberry yoghurt, watching to see if any light of kindness might emerge. But there was only ever anger in Baynes’s boiling red face – in his narrow, watery little eyes and pussy cheeks, which made him look like a crimson gargoyle.

‘Do it again, Toilet. Go. Now.’

Sometimes at night, as I lay in the sopping sheets, I dreamed of killing him. I would show no compassion. Or I would show the same degree of compassion that he had shown to me. It would come to the same thing. Good night, Baynes, I’d say, looking hard into his watery, hating eyes. Good night, Baynes, you, you . . . I knew all the bad words, but none of them was strong enough for my hatred of Baynes. The f-word, the c-word, a lot of b-words . . . The c-word is probably the one I’d have picked. It had a good sound, but it referred to something else, which wasn’t relevant; it was feeble, really: for power, it wasn’t even close.

I never for a moment considered killing myself, because it wouldn’t have achieved anything. Sometimes I had a fantasy of my body being found in the morning and the shock it would cause – how Baynes and Wingate and Hood would be chastened and remorseful; how it would be the making of them as men. They would become fine and philanthropic in their lives; they would spread so much happiness among men that the loss of unmourned Toilet Engleby long ago would in fact be a price worth paying.

But I knew it wouldn’t really be like that. What would actually happen would be that Mr Talbot would ask if anyone knew what the matter was. Keys, the head of house, would officially say I’d been ‘nervy’, but since he’d dosed me with the rules I’d appeared to be ‘settling down’. Ridgeway, my little fag teacher, had got me through the exam and that was all he had to do, so he’d be in the clear. McCain and Francis would say, ‘He seemed fine, sir.’ Batley would scarcely understand the question. Hood and Wingate and Baynes would feel uneasy, but no more. ‘Toilet couldn’t handle it, then,’ one of them would say, later, when Talbot had gone. ‘Yeah, must’ve been trouble at home or something.’ ‘He seemed all right in the house.’ The thing about those three was that they believed – or at least had convinced themselves – that what they were doing to me was part of the traditional experience that Collingham offered; on behalf of the school, themselves and even me, they were performing some semi-official service.

Mr Talbot himself wouldn’t want to prolong the inquiry. Perhaps he’d ask the doctor if I’d been to see him.

The doctor was a nasty little man called Benbow, who specialised in looking at your groin. The first week at school, he had squeezed our genitals in the ‘new boys’ inspection’. At the start of each subsequent term he required us all to strip except for a dressing gown whose flaps we parted when we reached the chair where he sat, shining a torch to see if we had a fungal growth called TC, a sort of athlete’s foot of the crotch. If so, the area was painted purple.

He’d be the last person I’d think of going to see.

Then Mr Talbot might ask the chaplain if I’d consulted him. The answer there would also be No. ‘spunky’ Rollason was not consulted about anything, even by the under-chaplain.

My mother wouldn’t make a fuss. She didn’t understand how the world, let alone such an institution, worked. The headmaster could probably keep it from the newspapers. Within a few days it would be forgotten.

In the end, Baynes, Hood and Wingate would feel nothing, because in the end that’s how everything that happens to you feels: it feels like nothing at all, really.

But I don’t want to think any more about Chatfield now or about Baynes, J.T. It’s long over.

It’s now 6.30 on Monday 19 November, 1973 and I’m sitting in my room in Clock Court at my ancient university.

I like these details of time. 6.31 on Monday 19 November 1973 is the front edge of time. I live on the forward atoms of the wave of time. It’s now 6.32. This is the present, yet it’s turning to the past as I sit here. What was future when I started (6.31) is now already past. What is this present, then? It’s an illusion; it’s not reality if it can’t be held. What therefore is there to fear in it? (I’m starting to sound like T.S. Eliot.)

Don’t patronise me if you read this thirty years on, will you? Don’t think of me as old-fashioned, wearing silly clothes or some nonsense like that. Don’t talk crap about ‘the seventies’, will you, as we now do about ‘the forties’. I breathe air like you. I feel food in my bowel and a lingering taste of tea in my mouth. I’m alive, as you are. I’m as modern as you are, in my way – I
couldn’t be
more modern. My reality is as complex as yours; the atoms making me and this world in their random movement are as terrible and strange and beautiful as those that make your world. Yours are in fact my atoms, reused. And you too, on your front edge of breaking time, Mr 2003, will be the object of condescending curiosity to the future – to Ms 2033. So don’t patronise me. (Unless of course you have completely overturned and improved my world, bringing peace and plenty, and a cure for cancer and schizophrenia, and a unified scientific explanation of the universe comprehensible to all, and a satisfactory answer to the philosophical and religious questions of our time. In which case you would be permitted to patronise primitive little 1973. Well, have you done those things? Got a cure for the common cold yet? Have you? Thought not. How’s your 2003 world, then? A few wars? Some genocide? Some terrorism? Drugs? Abuse of children? High crime rate? Materialistic obsessions? More cars? Blah-blah pop music? Vulgar newspapers? Porn? Still wearing jeans? Thought so. Yet you’ve had an extra thirty years to sort it out!)

The important thing is that this is now: 6.38, 19 November, 1973. It’s dark on Clock Court with its low box hedges and cobbled triangles. The lights are on in the dining hall where dinner will shortly be served.

Nothing in the future has yet happened. I find that a good thought.

As well as the Quicksilver Messenger Service poster, there is one for Procol Harum live at the Rainbow, Finsbury Park. I have on my cork board a picture of Princess Anne and Mark Phillips, taken from a magazine; one of David Bowie with Lou Reed and Iggy Pop, a rare monochrome poster showing them with their arms round one another’s shoulders in some New York disco; one of Marc Bolan, because he reminds me of Julie; and one of Julie in her school straw hat with her sticking-out teeth.

I took a train to London from Reading to see Procol Harum when they premiered their new album,
Grand Hotel
, with an orchestra and choir. It was good, but I wasn’t sure Mick Grabham was up to it as Robin Trower’s replacement on guitar, particularly on ‘Whaling Stories’, a song of which I need only to hear the opening note to find my stomach tense and my saliva fill with the re-experienced taste of Glynn Powers’s A-grade hashish. There’s something essential in Trower’s tone that Grabham didn’t catch.

This being the case, I bought Trower’s solo album whose first track, ‘I Can’t Wait Much Longer’, bears a weight of melancholy that is unendurable – in my ears anyway. (Though I still quite like it. In the doom there’s passion and booze and things to do with living. For a distillation of despair with
no
redeeming qualities, for a tincture of suicide in A minor, try ‘Facelift’ or ‘slightly All the Time’ from Soft Machine’s
Third
.)

I go to the corner cupboard and take out the white vermouth. It’s that time of day: time for the small blue ten-milligram pill and Sainsbury’s Chambéry with ice. I feel all right, within my limits. I’ve known much worse. Down the hatch.