The Brave (4 page)

"Well done, boy," she mouthed. "Keep it up."

One week. If he could go one week, he'd beat it forever. But take it a night at a time, he told himself.

Some of the boys in his dorm made remarks about the logs that propped up his bed. And on one occasion, in the bathroom, a boy called Pettifer, who seemed to be jealous of Tommy's friendship with Dickie, called him Log Boy. Dickie grabbed him by the throat, pinned him against the wall and threatened blood-curdling consequences if he ever said it again.

Their dorm was long and narrow with sixteen metal beds, eight each side, all with identical scarlet wool blankets. Every boy had a peg for his dressing gown and a metal chair on which to put his neatly folded clothes. Tommy's bed was the nearest to the door and this position carried with it the duty of keeping cave (which was apparently Latin for beware and was pronounced KV) and sounding the alarm at the approach along the corridor of Matron or "Whippet" Brent.

All the staff had nicknames: Mr Rawlston, the headmaster, was Charlie Chin because he didn't have one; Matron, being Welsh and fierce, was The Dragon; and Mr Lawrence was Ducky or The Duck, for reasons Tommy had yet to discover. Nobody however needed to explain Mr Brent's nickname. It referred both to his pointed canine features and to his reputation for administering the most ferocious beatings. His instrument of choice was a red leather, hard-heeled slipper, which left bruises known to last two weeks. Every night, at eight o'clock, when he came to turn off the lights, he would creep along the corridor in the hope of catching boys in the act of some beatable offence, like pillow fighting or reading a comic or an unsuitable book.

It was on the fifth evening that Tommy was to discover the burden of responsibility that his post as dormitory lookout truly entailed.

The boys had all returned to the dorm, scrubbed and energized, from the bathroom and Dickie Jessop was holding court. He had a seemingly endless repertoire of dirty jokes and rhymes. Few, if any, of his audience understood the sexual references, but they all laughed loudly to pretend they did. Displaying ignorance in these matters could transform you in a moment into a target for derision.

Except for Wadlow and a few others, too shy or unusual—and thus already excluded from the pack to be prey for the likes of Critchley and Judd—they were huddled on and around Dickie's bed, listening to a recital of rude limericks.

"Here's another," he said.

"A lesbian once in Khartoum

Took a nancy boy back to her room.

As they climbed into bed

The nancy boy said

Who does what and with what and to whom?"

Tommy didn't understand this one at all but he roared with the rest of them. Nobody seemed to have noticed that it was drawing close to eight o'clock. He was sitting alongside Dickie, basking in reflected glory. They were now generally considered to be best friends. Both had their backs to the door.

"Okay," Dickie said, holding up his hands for quiet. "Here's one I made up. How about this...

"There once was a Whippet called Brent

Whose cock was exceedingly bent..."

It was at this moment that Tommy noticed the grins beginning to vanish from the faces of the boys sitting opposite, the ones who had sight of the door. He turned to see what they were looking at. Standing just inside the doorway, leaning against the wall, was Mr Brent. He had his arms folded and a strange half-smile on his face. Everyone had seen him now. Except Dickie. He was too carried away by his own brilliance to have noticed the sudden chilling of the air.

"... To save Matron trouble,

He stuffed it in double

So rather than coming, he went!"

He laughed proudly and rocked back on the bed and it was only when he became aware that this one didn't seem to have gone down so well that he looked at the faces around him and then turned to see what they were all staring at.

Mr Brent unfolded his arms and gave three slow claps.

"Very good, Jessop. Quite the poet, I see."

There was a ripple of nervous laughter and Tommy thought for a moment that it was all going to be treated as a joke. Mr Brent still had that odd little smile on his lips. Then suddenly it was gone.

"All right," he snapped. "Into bed, everyone."

He watched them scatter like mice to their holes and when all was still, all eyes upon him, his finger poised on the light switch, he added quietly:

"I'll be seeing you later, Jessop. Lights out now! No talking."

He flicked the switch and they all lay frozen with fear in the darkness until his footsteps had faded along the corridor.

"You were supposed to be keeping cave, Bedford," Pettifer whispered from the other side of the room.

"I know," Tommy said. "Sorry, Jessop."

Dickie didn't answer. It was about half an hour before Mr Brent appeared in the doorway again and told him quietly to put on his dressing gown and slippers and to report downstairs to the changing room.

"Good luck, Dickie," Tommy whispered as Jessop shuffled past his bed. But again he didn't answer. For a long while nobody dared speak. Like Tommy, they were probably all imagining the scene. They knew the routine from the older boys, who always enjoyed scaring the newbugs. Dickie would be told to remove his dressing gown and bend over the wooden bench so that his nose was touching the wire mesh of one of the cages. And Mr Brent, in his shirtsleeves, would first slap the heel of the red leather slipper in the palm of his hand to give your imagination a little taste of what was to come. You never knew until the last moment how many strokes to expect. It was usually three, four or six, depending on the severity of the offence.

The silence that now hung over the upstairs of the school seemed to hum with fear and fascination. Every boy in every dormitory was listening. They all heard the distant dull clunk of the changing-room door being shut. Tommy held his breath. There was a long pause. Then the first muted thwack. And in the grateful safety of their beds, the whole school winced and silently began to count.

One, two...

Sometimes, if the victim was young or insufficiently brave, you would hear him cry out. But not tonight.

Three, four...

Tommy didn't know if there was a God, but in case there was, he began to pray. And not just for Dickie, that he might bear the pain, but also that he would forgive him and still be his friend.

Five, six...

Then silence. The listeners began to breathe again.

Now Dickie would be putting his dressing gown back on and then suffering the final humiliation of having to shake Whippet's hand. To absolve him, to thank him for his trouble.

When he came back to the dormitory, Dickie didn't say a word. There were a few whispered hard lucks and well dones and one idiot even asked him how it had felt. But Dickie didn't answer, just climbed back into bed, turned on his side and pulled the sheet and blanket up above his ears. Tommy couldn't tell if he was crying. For a long time nobody spoke. Then, across the darkness from the other side of the room, he heard Pettifer's venomous whisper: "Should have been you down there, Log Boy."

Tommy wet the bed that night. It was just after three in the morning and he lay weeping in the soggy warmth, wondering what to do. As quietly as he could, he pulled off the bottom sheet and tiptoed with it to the bathroom, wincing at every creak of the floorboards. Not daring to switch on the light, he sluiced the sheet in one of the big cast-iron baths then did the same with his pyjama bottoms, wringing them out as best he could. Then he tiptoed back to the dormitory and remade the bed, freezing whenever anyone shifted in his sleep, hardly daring to breathe, scanning the other beds in case someone was awake and watching him in the dark. He climbed back into bed and spent the rest of the night shivering and wet, his head churning with fear. Perhaps no one would notice.

Routine required that the boys strip back their top sheets before breakfast to let the beds air. And the yellow wet stain on Tommy's was as plain to see and almost as fascinating to his peers as the dried blood on the seat of Dickie Jessop's pyjamas. Dickie's stain was a badge of heroism, Tommy's of undiluted shame. Pettifer was the first to notice. He held his nose as he walked past.

"Bloody hell, Log Boy, what a stink! How revolting."

Tommy wet the bed again the following night and every night for a week. No one called him Log Boy any more, though not for fear of reprisals from Dickie Jessop, who now mostly ignored him. It was simply that someone had come up with a better nickname, the obvious one. He found it painted on his tuck box one morning in a sniggering amendment to his proper name.

To all of Ashlawn, from now on, he was no longer Bedford, but Bedwetter.

TOM REGRETTED coming almost as soon as he got there. He'd never much liked the man and liked even less the twist of jealousy that seeing him always inspired. Some people just brought out the worst in you. Truscott Hooper, known to friends and sycophants alike—both well represented here this evening—simply as Troop, was sitting at a little table in the far corner of the crowded college hall, signing copies of his book. There was a long line of adoring fans, some of whom Tom recognized. They should have known better.

Troop was on tour, publicizing his new bestseller, a thriller set in postinvasion Iraq. He was on the cover of this week's People magazine and Tom had seen him on the Today show. The book was already being made into a movie. It featured the same hero as the last three books, finely tailored to the spirit of the age (former Special Forces operative Brad Bannerman, dangerous but with the heart of a poet, wrongly disgraced for a misunderstood act of bravery, et cetera). Tom hadn't read any of them. It was hard enough to watch them sit gloatingly at the top of the bestseller lists without running the risk of discovering they were also actually rather good. That was what the critics said anyhow. There was nothing more galling than a fellow writer who managed to sell millions of books and get good reviews. It stole all legitimate grounds for contempt.

No sane New York publisher would include Montana on a book tour for an author as big as Troop. Fewer than a million people lived there and most of them had better things to do than read books. No, Troop's presence here this evening, the return of the famous author to the bosom of his alma mater, the University of Montana, Missoula (to which he had already apparently made a lavish donation—you could almost hear the library sprouting new wings), had nothing to do with selling books. It was, it had to be—in Tom's view—simply an act of patronizing vanity.

Troop was, by a long way, the most successful novelist ever produced by the UM creative-writing program. When Tom enrolled, in the mid-seventies, Troop was in his third year and already a star. He'd sold short stories to The New Yorker and was about to have his first novel published. At six-feet-five, he was literally, as well as professionally, head and shoulders above everyone else. He was dressed tonight, as always, entirely in black. It was a kind of trademark. The black beard and flowing black hair were grizzled now, but this—Tom had to concede—only gave him an even greater gravitas. They were both in their mid-fifties but Tom was the only one who looked it.

Troop's handsome face had been on posters all over town for weeks and this evening's talk in the university's largest auditorium had been a sellout. There were even people standing at the back. The speech had been infuriatingly witty and modest and interesting and the applause at the end had made the windows rattle. Admission to this champagne reception afterward was strictly by ticket only.

Just as Tom was looking for somewhere convenient to park his glass so he could leave, he became aware of a young woman hovering in front of him. She was smiling a little tentatively and had clearly been trying to attract his attention while he'd been scowling at Troop.

"You're Thomas Bedford, right?"

"Yes, I am. I'm sorry, I..."

She held out her hand and he shook it, a little too hard. His five-year-old documentary series on the history and culture of the Blackfeet had recently aired again on PBS and Tom imagined she must have recognized him from that. Or maybe she'd been to one of his occasional lectures here at UM. She was good-looking in an unflashy kind of way. Late twenties, he guessed, maybe thirty. Fair skinned and freckly, thick auburn hair bundled up in a green silk scarf. Tom pulled in his stomach and smiled.

"Karen O'Keefe," she said. "We have the same dentist. I saw you there a couple of weeks ago."

"Ah."

He tried not to look crestfallen. There was an awkward pause.

"Did you enjoy the talk?" she said.

"Oh, Troop always puts on a good show."

"You're friends?"

"Not exactly. We were on the writers' program here together. He was a couple of years ahead of me," he couldn't resist adding.

"I wanted to kick him."

Now Tom was interested. He laughed.

"Really? Why was that?"

"Oh, I don't know. All that phony modesty, when you can see from a hundred miles he's got an ego the size of Everest. If he could write a decent sentence, I might feel more charitable."

Tom smiled, trying not to look too pleased.

"Are you a writer?" he asked.

"A filmmaker. Like you. Except you're a filmmaker and a writer. And I'm not suggesting I'm on anything like your level. I really enjoyed seeing your Blackfeet series again, by the way. And I loved the book. Great piece of work. Kind of definitive. I must have given it to a dozen people."

"Thank you. That accounts for about half the total sales."

A fan. Tom wasn't used to it. He got the occasional letter, of course, but it had been years since he'd had an encounter like this. He was almost lost for words.

"How come an Englishman has this great passion for the West?" she said, filling the pause.

"Oh, that's a long story."

But it didn't stop him telling it. He had it perfectly honed: the childhood obsession with cowboys and Indians; how he'd grown up in little countryside and how, when he came to live in the States, the sheer scale of the real thing had blown him away; then his fascination at discovering the brutal truth behind all that myth and legend.

"You mean, like, the true story of the West."

"Yes. I remember that first time I went to Little Bighorn—"

"Tommy!"

A hand clamped his shoulder and as he turned, Troop locked him in a bear hug that squashed Tom's glasses into one eye. Luckily he'd finished his drink or it would have soaked them both. The Tommy had given him a shock. He thought he'd lost that name forever at boarding school. Along with his innocence and much else besides.

"Hello, Troop," he said. "How're you doing?"

"Good, man. Good! And all the better for seeing you."

Troop partially released him but was still gripping Tom's upper arms with his massive, hairy hands so that he could inspect him.

"You're looking good, man. You must work out?"

"No. Never have, never will."

"How's that gorgeous wife of yours—Jan, right?"

"Gina. We split up fifteen years ago."

"Shit. I'm sorry. You had a daughter, right?"

"A son. Daniel."

"Daniel. How's he doing?"

"Okay, I think. I don't see a whole lot of him. He's in Iraq at the moment."

"Jeez. A journalist?"

"No, he's with the Marines."

"An officer."

"Corporal."

"Well, I'll be damned."

"Won't we all."

Tom turned to Karen O'Keefe, who was watching them with a wry little smile. He introduced them and noted the way Troop fixed her with his dark eyes and gripped her arm while he shook her hand, holding it a few moments longer than was necessary. Tom had seen Bill Clinton do the same many times on TV.

"Karen is one of your greatest fans," Tom said.

"There's no accounting for taste," Troop said.

"Actually, I've never read a word you've written," Karen O'Keefe said. Tom was getting to like her more each moment.

"Well, that's okay too."

"Too drenched in testosterone, I'm afraid."

"And you know that even though you've never read a word I've written."

"You'd probably call it female intuition."

Troop smiled but his eyes had already hardened.

"Would I?"

He turned to Tom.

"Still living in Missoula?"

"Don't seem to be able to escape."

"It's a great part of the world. I just bought a place down in the Bitterroots."

"Great."

"It's just a cabin, really. But I figure on spending more time up here. LA gets a little frantic sometimes. Well, listen, I'd better—what do they call it?—circulate a little. Catch you later, Tom."

"You bet."

Troop nodded at Karen O'Keefe and she gave him a smile that somehow managed to be both courteous and insolent.

"What a jerk," she said when he was barely out of earshot.

"Remind me to stay on the right side of you."

She laughed and put her hand on his arm, letting it stay there for a moment.

They swapped numbers and e-mail addresses and went their separate ways. When Tom left she was talking with a cruelly handsome guy her own age. It had been a long time since he'd let himself feel attracted to a woman in that way. But he probably wouldn't call her. Since Gina left he'd had two or three romantic skirmishes but nothing that had lasted. He lived alone with his dog and that was how he liked it. He got lonely sometimes and missed the companionship, the physical intimacy, not that there had been much of either with Gina at the end.

The house they had built together sat in the bend of a creek about a mile east of town. As he came around the last corner his headlights found a small herd of deer holding a meeting in the middle of the road and he slowed and stopped and sat watching them until they melted into the trees. It was early spring and there was no moon and when he got out of his car, he stood for a long time in the driveway, staring at the stars and listening to the rush of the creek.

Makwi was there, as she always was, to greet him when he came in through the front door. She was a mongrel mix of deerhound, greyhound and collie, what in England or Ireland they would call a lurcher. She had a rough brindle coat and the biggest heart of any dog he'd known. He knelt and let her nuzzle his face while he rubbed her neck and her ears and told her he'd take her out for a walk in just a moment. She followed him into the kitchen and stood watching while he poured himself a glass of milk. The answering machine on the divider was flashing red, telling him there were four messages. He hit the play button and, as he waited for the tape to rewind, pulled out his cell phone. He'd switched it off for Troop's talk and forgotten to switch it back on. There were two voice mails.

All six messages were from Gina. They hadn't talked in more than a year. Her voice sounded strained and increasingly anxious at not being able to get hold of him. She didn't say why she needed to talk with him so urgently, but there was no need. He knew there could be only one reason. Danny. Something must have happened to Danny.