Engleby (9 page)

‘Where’s Troughton’s?’ I asked.

‘Down Dock Walk, behind Greville.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Keep your head down. Don’t speak. Don’t be nervy.’

‘Nervy?’

‘Pushy. Don’t show off. Be invisible.’

‘Thank you, Ridgeway.’

I had spent a week in Bexhill once, but apart from that had never slept outside my parents’ house, so I was interested to know how it would feel. I didn’t know where I was meant to go to clean my teeth or what time I was meant to turn my light out, so I brushed them in the room and spat out of the window. I turned the light off early, wondering if Batley had yet figured out what the metal switch inside the door was for.

I can’t remember much of the first few days. I think I expected that at some time someone would explain what it was all about, but gradually it became clear that
not
explaining was the Chatfield way. It was a sign of weakness to ask a question; ‘initiative’ was shown by not making a fuss. You were meant to know what to do. How? Instinct? Tarot? Sortilege? No, just by being a good crew member, by not making a fuss, by just
knowing
.

‘Keep your head down.’ It was Ridgeway’s hunted look more than his actual words that stayed with me.

Being the holder of the Romney Open meant that I was placed in classes with boys a year or two older. They responded to my impertinence by not talking to me – ever. Not in all the time I was at that school.

The lessons were given by masters who all looked alike. They wore black gowns over tweed jackets and baggy grey trousers; they had lace-up tan shoes with enormous welts, so they rolled along the cloisters as though on brown tyres. They all had flat grey hair and similar, one-word nicknames – ‘stalky’ Read, ‘Mug’ Benson, ‘Tubby’ Lyneham, ‘Bingo’ Maxwell; it was hard to tell them apart, to feel anything for them or about them, and this indifference was reciprocated.

Stalky Read did have a particular phrase of his own, now I come to think of it: ‘Take the first bus to the Prewett.’ What the hell did that mean? Park Prewett, it was eventually explained to me, was a famous loony bin, near Basingstoke. If you made an elementary mistake in geography, Stalky’s advice never varied: ‘First bus to the Prewett. Leaves at two.’

When I was returning to my cubicle after lessons on perhaps my third day at Chatfield, I found that two-thirds of the way down the corridor, barring my path, stood a large boy, about seventeen, with his hands stuck in his belt. He glared at me as I got close, his face set in a sneer. I couldn’t take cover in any of the rooms en route because I didn’t know any of the boys in them. When eventually I reached him, he sidestepped to prevent me passing. I tried the other side, but he moved across to block the way. I looked up at him to see what he wanted. He was about two feet taller than me and had the features I’d already noticed were common at Chatfield: a mask of erupting spots and damp-looking hair. He didn’t really seem to
have
hair, in fact, but something more like a pint of oil poured over his scalp and divided into shiny hanks; his complexion looked as though a carton of raspberry yoghurt had exploded in his face. Eventually he let me pass, kicking me in the coccyx as I went. His name, I was told, was Baynes, J.T.

He had two friends called Wingate and Hood. They told me they’d ‘noticed’ me. I was ‘nervy’, that was my trouble, wasn’t it?

When I got back that afternoon after football, my sheets were soaking wet and all my clothes had been strewn round the room. I slept on the mattress that night, but the next day it, too, was soaked in water, so I lay down on the springs.

In the main corridor of Collingham there was a table where bread and margarine was sent up twice a day in plastic dustbins. The margarine was wholesale grade, stamped on the wrapper ‘not for retail distribution’, and often got smeared over the wall and floor, where it mixed with Marmite and golden syrup. A paper bag full of crystals was sent up in the dustbin with it; the idea was that if you mixed them with water, they made some sort of fizzy drink, though I never saw anyone try it. One of my jobs was to clean this area, and for this I was given a cloth that had been used to soak up milk. It was difficult to do more than smear the slick into new positions, while trying not to gag from the smell of the cloth.

My efforts were watched by a tall, pale prefect called Marlow, who looked as though the tightness of his starched collar was preventing the blood from reaching his face. It was to be done again, then again – not for the sake of cleanliness, but for some other, vaguer, reason. And then, said Marlow, looking at the floor, I could do it again.

Eventually, I was told to go and see the head of house, an unsmiling young man called Keys, with the grey face of someone who had eaten a hundredweight of bread and margarine in his five years, but had come to understand Chatfield. He told me that my ‘attitude’ was wrong and that he was going to beat me with the cane. I wasn’t aware that I had an attitude, right or wrong. Alternatively, I could write out the whole school rules – about eight sides of single-spaced small print – three times by ten o’clock the next evening. Keys was short (he played scrum half ), but he looked strong, and unstable; there was a deadness in his eyes. I opted for the rules. This meant writing by torchlight beneath the bedclothes and beneath the desk throughout lessons all the following day. Part of the punishment was the risk of being caught by the teacher and beaten anyway. Keys didn’t seem gratified when I handed him the encyclopaedia-thick stack of curling sheets; he looked disappointed, and sent me off with a warning that next time it would be beating without the option.

I was told to get up half an hour early and take a cup of tea in bed to the boy in charge of our run of cubicles, who, it turned out, was Baynes. I had to shake him vigorously by the shoulder to rouse him, and when he had cursed me for a time and drunk some tea, he came to inspect my cubicle, running his finger along the glazing bars of the window to look for dust.

My days had a sort of rhythm. Breakfast, silent lessons, back to check on havoc in my room; clear up; more silent lessons, rugby; chores; bed . . . I had a tiny transistor radio, about the size of half a paperback, with an earpiece. I could sometimes manage to escape beneath the bedclothes.

God, I don’t know.

The latrine block was some way from our house and no one had told me when we were allowed to go. One morning we were about ten minutes into Physics, when I put up my hand and said, ‘Please, sir, can I go to the toilet?’

The teacher said No, I couldn’t, I must wait. All the other boys started muttering ‘toilet’. I thought I’d picked the wrong time to go, but no one had told me any better. Gradually, I began to see that it wasn’t my choice of time but of word. Toilet was considered an outlaw word. I’d never heard the thing called by any other name at home, St B’s or the grammar school, so what was I meant to call it? It took me a long time to establish. The big block was called the Jackson Rears; the urinal halfway up the stairs, the one we shared with the house above, was called the Halfway House. The cubicle beneath the stairs was the Dump. There was no generic.

By the end of the day there was no one in Collingham who didn’t refer to me as ‘Toilet’. Toilet Engleby, that was my name. I had to suppress a flinch of recognition when someone called out ‘Toilet!’ in the corridor.

Baynes and Hood and Wingate weren’t going to let me get away with that. ‘Come here when I call you, Toilet. Don’t you know your own name?’ They took me to the Dump and held my head in the bowl, then flushed it.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Engleby.’

They went on and on until finally when I came spluttering up, I answered, ‘Toilet.’ I thought that would satisfy them, but they seemed disappointed when they let me go.

It was surprising how quickly I got used to this. Every day I woke up with a feeling of low panic in my gut. My defences were on full alert by the time I went down to the bathroom to clean my teeth at seven-fifteen.

The other boys in my term, Francis, McCain and Batley, talked quietly amongst themselves. None of the boys in the year above would chance talking to me, especially the ones I went to lessons with. There was one boy called ‘spaso’ Topley, who looked like a fish in specs – the house joke, beneath even bullying – who occasionally gave me a sort of girlish simper but didn’t risk speech.

I couldn’t blame them. Batley was in some class so elementary that it didn’t have even a year number attached to it, so I never saw him, except once, coming back from the rugby field, when he happened to walk past. He said, ‘Bad luck, Toilet.’ Batley was probably all right in a way.

I had surprisingly been picked for the second team rugby in my year. I played hooker, where the main job was, as Ridgeway might have put it, to ‘keep your head down’. Then the First XV hooker got mumps and I was promoted. I didn’t know any of the others, because although they were my age they were in different houses and a junior academic year. By some telepathy they’d picked up that it was dangerous to talk to me, though one or two did call me by my proper name, and one said ‘Well played.’ So I grew keen on rugby and stayed late practising – so much so that when the First XV hooker recovered he couldn’t get back into the side. I became a tackler as well as a scrummager; I enjoyed driving my shoulder into someone’s solar plexus to hear him gasp. I liked to run behind a pimpled little shit who’d ‘toileted’ me and throw myself at his ankles, risking the mouthful of studs for the pleasure of hearing him hit the ground; and then he might accidentally get trampled at the bottom of the ruck that followed. I swapped boots with McCain, who hated rugby but had metal studs; sometimes there was blood on my laces.

Afterwards, most people went to the small food shop and bought chips or sweets to supplement the swill doled out from metal troughs at mealtimes. For some reason – being broke, probably – my mother hadn’t thought to give me any pocket money so I relied on the bread and margarine sent up to Collingham. One day, though, she sent a cake. When the post came, a young boy called out the name of anyone who had a letter. ‘Parcel for Toilet!’ called his unbroken voice, and a number of doors opened.

‘I think we’d better have a look and see what’s in there,’ said Baynes, grabbing the parcel. It didn’t take him long to tear off the brown paper. ‘A cake! Who said you could have a cake, Toilet?’

‘Look,’ said Hood, ‘it’s home-made by Mrs Toilet. Can’t she afford to go to a shop?’

‘It’s not a cake,’ said Wingate. ‘Feel how heavy it is. Catch.’

He threw it to to Hood, who caught it and tore a bit off. He put it in his mouth. ‘Christ, it tastes of shit,’ he said. ‘It tastes of toilet shit.’

‘Is that what you eat at home?’ said Baynes. ‘Toilet shit?’

They began to throw the cake around, sometimes dropping it on purpose, all the time keeping up a commentary, things like, ‘What’s for lunch today, Mrs Toilet? Let’s have shit, shall we?’

I went to the table and picked up the wrapping from the floor and went back to my room, leaving them to do what they wanted with the cake. There was a note inside the brown paper saying, ‘Mike, Me and Julie baked this. Hope you like it! Love, Mum.’

It probably wasn’t up to much, because neither of them were very good cooks and Julie was only five anyway.

A couple of days later I was doing the evening prep in my room, when Wingate opened the door without knocking. He was a troubled-looking boy who hung around the showers a lot. He didn’t say anything, just walked round the cubicle, picking things up, looking at them closely, then putting them down again. He had fewer spots than Baynes, a blue, stubbly chin and dead-fish eyes.

I didn’t say anything, and neither did he. He stood by the bed and looked at me. ‘Get on with your work, Toilet,’ he said eventually.

I looked down to the passage of Livy I was preparing for class the next day. I didn’t dare to look at Wingate, but I became aware that he was doing something to himself as he stood over my bed. The Latin sentences swelled and dissolved. I couldn’t make much of them. Wingate let out a small grunt. ‘Better wash those blankets, Toilet,’ he said, buttoning up his trousers.

Chatfield was in a straggling village that clung to the perimeter of the school grounds. Upper and Lower Rookley were bisected by the enormous college and its playing fields, its cross-country runs, its rifle ranges, its evergreen woods and assault courses. On top of the hill in Upper Rookley was Longdale, a hospital for the criminally insane. The college and the hospital had been founded in the same year, 1855; the committee of the bin wanted the high ground for the views, the school governors wanted the flat playing fields below, so everyone was happy, if that’s the word we’re looking for.

Every Monday at nine-fifty, during our double Chemistry period, Longdale had an emergency escape practice, which meant sounding its siren. ‘sir, sir,’ said twenty boys at once, ‘Bograt’s escaped, sir.’ Bograt Duncan rolled his eyes and sighed. I tried joining in the communal joke once, but only once.

A patient did escape once, as a matter of fact, and the headmaster called an emergency assembly of the entire school. He warned us not to talk to any strangers in the grounds. I went for a walk in the woods that afternoon, half hoping I might bump into him.

What was odd about Chatfield was that it enjoyed a high reputation. It was expensive. It played rugby against other famous schools, like Harrow, and while a lot of its pupils went off to the navy, plenty went to universities, some even to the best ones.