The Northern Clemency (26 page)

There was silence in the classroom, and then Andrew nudged him. He raised his head, and everyone was looking at him. “What do you think you’re doing, young man?” Miss Barker said. He blushed, hugely; he couldn’t explain it wasn’t him who had made the mark, but before he could have said anything she was off on a flourish of triumphant unfairness about people from London, yes, London, who don’t think we have anything worth respecting in the North, and in a moment, like a jubilant coda to a stupendously enlarged symphonic movement, Miss Barker’s understanding of the nation’s historical divide into North and South, oppression of labour by the effete, exemplified for the moment by the prevalence of pork butchers, the honourable trades of coal mining and steel manufacturing and one ten-year-old boy.

“Not you, young man,” she said dreadfully, as the dinner-bell rang. “You’re staying behind.” There were, it seemed, many nasty stupid tasks for him to undertake, and for five minutes the supervising simper in her voice had an almost ecstatic quality. So he was late into the dinner hall, and when he arrived, his usual group, Anthony and Andrew and Susan and the others, they’d not been able to save a place for him—you weren’t supposed to, but sometimes you could. They looked fairly stricken in apology.

The only place spare was with the people he didn’t want to sit with, Timothy Glover and the other new players in the game. He sat down shyly. The others were noisier than his friends, and he didn’t feel up to talking in his usual way; they might regard his ordinary London voice with proper hatred. If Miss Barker was licensed to display frank loathing of him because of where he came from and what he might be thought to represent, then the most conspicuous label of that side of
his nature, his voice, ought to be kept subdued in front of people without any constraints. They sort of acknowledged him, surprised, jeering in tone even if their remarks were bland items of unspecific ridicule, unarticulated fragments of a general contempt towards any convenient and temporarily current element of school life. In fact, they seemed to be talking—not Timothy Glover, he was just shovelling it down placidly—but the others with their harsh Crookes voices, they seemed to be talking about football, about Wednesday and United. Francis couldn’t have joined in, and it was, anyway, a strikingly adult, cynical conversation. Never in his life had Francis heard his father say anything about football. But this, nevertheless, seemed the sort of thing adults talked about. The subject might have been removed from Francis’s interests, but it felt directed somewhat at him. The jeering tone of the conversation was pointed his way, surely, and after a few moments, one of them asked him who he supported. “I don’t know,” Francis said helplessly, and they laughed coarsely, as if it were a funny thing to say. He said only one more thing, when he wanted to have some tomato sauce. Wanting to pass, to erode the improper Southern noise in his voice, he tried to say “tomato” as a Northerner, perhaps, might say it. But he didn’t know; the
a
wouldn’t go easily into a short
a
, like one in “castle” or “bath” or “pass,” and it came out wrong, ridiculous and apologetic. They asked him to repeat himself, unbelieving, and he just blushed and reached for what he had asked for. And afterwards they broke Andrew’s leg.

The game began again after lunch, as usual. The others were sitting on the steps outside. Francis would have been sitting with them, and came out, not exactly with the others he’d been eating with. “Get that Jameson,” one said, and one slapped Andrew on the back, the agreed signal for the beginning of the game, and Andrew was off and running, the quarry for the chasers. Francis held back, and so did Anthony and Susan and the two Pauls, not really joining in, just running loosely in the right sort of direction. But the others, the new ones, they were playing with some sort of commitment. Andrew yelped, and dodged, jinking through a forming row of Shirley Temple players, and someone’s head, not his, was hit, hard, with the side of a hand. Andrew was a fast runner, and dodged well, but there were too many of them; he was nearly safe, had nearly got to the protected territory when two of the chasers, as if by arrangement, ran into him from different directions and pushed him, falling on top, on to the concrete steps, the
agreed asylum. They got up, cheering; Andrew moved, and then shrieked, a high animal shriek. He had gone pale; around him, the players gathered, going quiet, and then the playground went quiet, everyone gathered.

“Don’t move,” a teacher said. “Just stay exactly as you are. Someone go and fetch the nurse,” and half a dozen girls sped off, excited at this drama. Francis stood there, awed. Andrew just lay there, making no noise, his face absolutely white; the teacher was kneeling down and talking quietly to him. Quite suddenly, Andrew’s eyes rolled back, and his head and neck collapsed limply.

“He’s dead, he’s dead,” a girl shouted.

“No, he’s not,” the teacher said briskly. “He’s just fainted. Everyone, please, just go away, we don’t need an audience.” They drifted away, but Francis stayed, hovering. The nurse came quickly, brushing them aside—it wasn’t just him hovering, but some other people, not even in their year, people who didn’t even know Andrew, too—and covered him with a blanket, telling him again not to move. The playground had stopped all its games, and the people in it stood around talking in small excited groups, drifting over to have another look in case Andrew might have died, then walking away again before they could be shouted at.

In a few minutes, an ambulance came, through the school gates and then, amazingly, signalled by another teacher, slowly through the playground itself, scattering people in its stately wake. It wasn’t flashing any lights or anything. It stopped by Andrew, and two men got out with a different, professional red blanket. It all took fifteen minutes; putting Andrew in a kind of contraption, tying his leg up, putting him on a stretcher, and loading him into the back of the van like goods, joking all the time and Andrew, forcefully encouraged, responding more faintly. Then the ambulance’s doors were shut behind him, and, with the same stately motion, the van drove off. “They’ll be taking him to the children’s hospital,” someone said by Francis’s side, and he turned to see that it was someone he’d never seen before who had spoken. There was no one he recognized around. They’d all disappeared, and he was in the middle of strangers again.

The afternoon began with another of Miss Barker’s lectures, but after five minutes, a fourth-year came in and interrupted: the headmaster wanted to see the boys concerned. Miss Barker indicated Timothy Glover, and the other boy, the ones who had run into Andrew, and they
left, grinning with bravado. Francis felt the empty half of his desk like a badge of grief; he felt ennobled in his loss. “Oh, it’s all fun and games until someone breaks a leg,” Miss Barker said suddenly; she had been talking about—what? About the seven hills of Sheffield? “I know, I’ve seen you all, it was bound to end like that. You in particular, I’ve seen—” and it was like a slow-motion slap, the way she turned again, with some kind of obscure adult delight, to Francis and his London badnesses “—I’ve seen you, chasing the girls and knocking them over, slamming right into them, making them cry. Well, we’ve heard of chasing the girls and making them cry before, haven’t we, Georgy-Porgy? There’s one thing absolutely certain, that sort of carry-on, it’s going to stop right now, because we’ve seen where it ends, and when I see the headmaster, I’m certainly going to tell him,” and by now she was almost singing, almost some playground song, never written down, never had to be, I’m
GOING
, to
TELL
him, “where I think it’s all come from, and I don’t think it’s the young men who he’s talking to now. What do you think? Georgy-Porgy?”

That night, he told his mother and father about Andrew breaking his leg like that; it was a serious story, he told both of them together. He left some of it out; he made it sound like an accident, and he didn’t really explain about the game, the way it had been going sour. He didn’t go on, either, to say what Miss Barker had said afterwards, the way she’d alighted on something to call him, Georgy-Porgy; it was a name too silly and childish to repeat, and the deliberate humiliation, like the immediate dread of new loneliness with Andrew in hospital, belonged to something that couldn’t be easily told, what he felt, not what had happened. She might not call him that tomorrow, Francis explained to himself, she might forget it, he tried to insist to himself.

He finished telling what he had to tell, and took a pear from the fruit bowl on the table. “Poor boy,” his mother said. “We’ll find out what hospital he’s in, and go and visit.” Francis snapped off the stalk of the pear. They were bought pears, soft and grainy, not like the hard-fleshed wooden ones that had grown in the back garden of their house in London. He had liked those better.

“I’ll give his parents a ring,” his father said. “See if there’s anything practical we can do.”

Francis explained that a phone was one of the things Andrew’s family didn’t have.

“That’s just ridiculous,” his mother said.

Francis took a big bite from the pear; he liked the audacious way you
could eat a pear, not, like an apple, round the middle then the end bits, but from the very top to the very bottom, leaving nothing but a sort of little plug of twiggy papery brown bits, a sort of belly-button, it kind of looked like.

“When you think of it, in this day and age,” Francis’s father said. “I can’t imagine how the school managed to let them know he’d broken his leg in the first place.”

“They’ll have phoned the father at work,” Francis’s mother said. “Well, I suppose we could go round there, see if there’s anything …”

Francis sat there, not contributing; the flesh of the pear, gritty, almost sandy, its taste like—like—. He tried to think, took another bite, concentrated. “I know where he is,” he said in the end. “He’s in the children’s hospital. I can go and visit, can’t I, anyway, I mean, not ask his mum and dad, do I need to?”

“We’ll go down tomorrow,” Francis’s dad said. “I’ll take you, as soon as I get home from work.”

Andrew wasn’t frightened. Was he supposed to be? People kept telling him not to be, and if it wasn’t for their feelings, he’d have said, “I’m not.” He wasn’t excited, either; when the ambulance man had come, he’d said they’d be going in an ambulance, and wouldn’t that be exciting? Well, that was stupid, because the ambulance was there, it had come to fetch him, of course they’d be going in an ambulance. It was interesting, really, seeing inside the back of an ambulance, though he’d not been able to have a good look. Maybe when he was well they’d take him home in an ambulance and then he’d look properly—oh, no, that doesn’t happen, when you’re well again, you don’t need an ambulance, so—

His thoughts kept going like that, he didn’t know why. The fuss and bother had subsided, and he was in a bed in a ward, the lights turned down, only little pools of light here and there. It didn’t hurt; they’d injected him and then it hadn’t hurt. There hadn’t been time to be frightened of the injection, it had just happened like that.

It was interesting, not exciting or frightening, Andrew decided. It was interesting to know that he’d fainted once or twice. He’d never fainted before, he hadn’t known what it would be like. It was like going to sleep but so quickly, and you weren’t tired, it was like being swallowed up by something soft and black. And then Caroline arriving, his big sister, with pyjamas and a bag of stuff, they’d got her out of school,
and after his dad arrived, having the X-ray taken of his leg, and looking at that, that was definitely interesting. He wondered if they’d give you the photograph if you asked. If you had your appendix out they’d give it to you afterwards in a jar, that’s what Paul had said. He’d ask next time he thought of it.

Hospital was interesting, too, with its smell and the ill people all around him and the ugly toys that didn’t belong to anyone in particular, but mostly it was comforting and just sort of right. They’d gone home now, Caroline and his dad, and it was nice to be on your own and safe from all sorts of things. He wouldn’t have to go back to school for weeks maybe. He could feel a kind of weight on one side of him vaguely—oh, the cast, his leg was in a cast. He closed his eyes, nice and warm, his thoughts nicely dribbling away, falling in stages into a crisp white sleep.

But the next day Francis dragged himself out of sleep; dragged over getting out of bed when his mother called, pulling his bedspread up to his nose, his breath clouding the freezing bedroom air; dragged himself into a dressing-gown, hung silently over his breakfast. His father started to ask something about Andrew, but Francis didn’t really know, he said, and then his mother joined in, speculating. Sandra wasn’t saying anything; she didn’t talk much in the morning, these days, but she was looking at him, preparing to work something out as if she was sharpening a pencil in her head. Time to go, and he went upstairs to dress, dragging until his father called sharply; and then, dropped outside the school gates, he dragged again. He knew what was waiting for him. He felt as if the playground, the pre-school running, all those unfamiliar people were falling away from him as he crossed the space, all spitefully aware of his plight. He put his coat and gloves in the cloakroom, went to the classroom, almost the first, and sat there, getting his stuff out of the bag, arranging it neatly and, in bursts, the rest of the class came in. No one paid him any attention, there trying to fill the half of his desk. But it wasn’t Andrew’s absence he was thinking about.

In time Miss Barker came in, her fat face smiling, like a preening small bear with whiskers to wipe, the red form register under her left arm. He sat upright, and she let the class quieten down without comment, as if they were on her side; she began to read the register. Francis waited, but Sellers was down the alphabet. “Andrew Jameson,” she murmured to herself, “Nooooo—now, let’s see …” reaching for a different
pen to cope with Andrew’s absence. Francis waited, his fists clenched, and after twelve names she came to it.

“Francis Sellers,” she said, in a voice of glad recognition.