The One Safe Place (15 page)

Meanwhile, as he lay in bed, he kept hearing the threat the man in court had only mouthed. Surely it was the kind of threat you heard in the schoolyard, boys saying they'd smash someone's face to a pulp or break their arms and legs or cut their balls off. Words could be a kind of violence you committed when you hoped not to go any further. The older man had elbowed Ken hard in the ribs when he'd seen him mouthing, and the three had only stared at the Travises as Marshall's parents had led him out. They hadn't been following whenever he'd looked back, and he ought to remember they had no reason to follow. They'd find out as soon as they spoke to their relative—find out that Marshall had done nothing whatsoever to him.

Marshall slept before he expected to, and awoke on Saturday knowing the weekend was planned in advance. That afternoon he went bowling with his friends from school, and later he ate Indian with his parents at the Shere Khan. On Sunday his father took him to Laserquest, where they zapped as many opponents in the dark plasterboard maze as they could without having their own laser guns disabled. After dinner at home they went with Marshall's mother to the ice rink.

It was in a building as large as a barn—too large for the disco music which grew blurred with trying to encompass the rink. Soon Marshall was skating across the ice while clumps of people hobbled around its edge and clung to the low wall. He met his parents in the mist beneath the yellowish arc lights, and then they glided arm in arm away from him, and he thought they were reliving some part of their life together, perhaps from before he'd been born. Suddenly—he didn't know why—the air tasted like tears. He had to give them time with each other, but once he saw them swooping back toward him he wobbled to them, having lost his confidence. "Here he comes," his father cried, stretching out a hand to catch him, but Marshall couldn't feel supported while he was unable to ask whether they already knew what he had only just realised—that his useless performance on the witness stand would set the gunman free.

He tried not to let his mother see him shiver, but she did, and five minutes later the Travises reclaimed their shoes. Outside the night seemed as cold as the rink. As the Volvo swung out of the parking lot onto the main road a pair of headlamp beams hacked through the car, and the outlines of Marshall's parents blazed as if they were exploding. All the way through several suburbs of Manchester he was intensely aware of them, close enough to touch and yet rendered unreal as paper silhouettes by his sense of their vulnerability. A hair sprouted from the top of his father's head, and every oncoming car spotlighted it and the drooping night-heavy flower of his mother's hair. He was still seeing the fragile silhouettes as he fell asleep in bed, afraid to dream. He was still feeling vulnerable on their behalf as he walked to school the next morning.

He'd barely reached the Wilmslow Road when boys from the school, some of whom he hadn't realised he even knew, began to pump him about his day in court. "What did they give him?" "Did they put handcuffs on him?" "Was it like on telly?" "Did you have to swear?" "Did he attack anyone?" "Was it like in the films?" Marshall answered these and many other questions as best he could, wishing he could feel like the celebrity they seemed to take him for. He'd reached the pedestrian crossing nearest Bushy Road when a car even blacker than the July sky squealed to a halt scant inches from him.

As the green guardian of the crossing turned red the car roared away, driven by a brawnier version of Billy Heathcote, presumably the security guard whose job had put him in hospital. Billy stood by Marshall and bumped him negligently with an elbow. "I hope you got him put away for as long as they're allowed to lock him up."

"We don't know yet."

"You know what you did." Heathcote followed him across the road as cars began to bully slowpokes off the crossing. "You know that, I reckon."

"My best."

"I should bloody hope so. If I'd been you I'd have said he did as much as they couldn't prove was wrong and landed him in Strangeways till his hair turned white."

"Or looked a fool when his lawyer kept after you."

"Eh? Half the time I can't tell what you're on about with that accent of yours."

"I thought you and your dad were supposed to believe in the law?"

"Don't you say that about my dad." Heathcote must have felt he'd made clear what he took Marshall to have said, because he went on, "You'd be quick enough to scream for him if you needed him. Or maybe you think you don't need the law, maybe you want the man who nearly shot your dad wandering around loose. I bet you'd rather the police never made up any evidence even if it got scum like him locked up. I bet you'd like the social workers and all the rest of the do-gooders to send him on a holiday to, to Florida."

Marshall had rather lost track of all this, which felt as though a large dog was panting in his face while trying to knock him over. "Why Florida?"

"Never mind bloody laughing about it. That's what they do these days in case you didn't know, send scum to Disneyland because they're so deprived."

"It's Disneyworld in Florida." Marshall was trying to control his mouth, having seen how it aggravated Heathcote's all-embracing anger. "Look, this is crazy. What are we fighting about?"

"I'm not fighting, lad. You'd bloody know if I was."

"Like Tom Bold did," Marshall said, experiencing a sudden urge to throw all his weight behind a punch in Heathcote's face. The ease with which he could be driven to pointless violence dismayed him. Why hadn't he been capable of violence when Fancy had been lying in wait for his father? "I'm not arguing with you any more," he said. "Keep your nose out of my business before it gets hurt."

"Here it is." Heathcote lurched in front of him, poking his own nose almost flat with a forefinger. "What are you going to do about it? Have a go, I dare you, unless you're a queer."

Marshall stepped around him, which brought him in sight of the schoolyard and a teacher. "Is it dark up there?"

Heathcote crowded him as far as the gates and shoved in ahead of him, then turned on him. "Where?"

Marshall walked away before muttering, "Up your ass." Saying it made him feel less satisfied than lazy, no longer taking the trouble to invent a substitute for profanity as his parents did, and not having said it to Heathcote's face smacked of cowardice.

Before long the bell which he imagined earning curses from any night shift workers who lived nearby went off to herd all the boys into line, where they had to stand still and stop talking and then troop class by class into the school. Several hundred of them thundered at the pace of prisoners returning to their cells along the gloomy corridors that smelled of sweat and chalk and floor polish, and into the hall crowded with rows of inseparable folding seats with too little leg room. The last of the boys barely had time to be seated when everyone jumped or reared or lolled or staggered to their feet as Mr. Harbottle strode onto the stage, followed by his staff.

After the morning's token nod to religion the headmaster lectured in his high sharp disappointed voice on bullying and how it must be reported to a member of the staff. "Bullies must learn that being bigger and stronger gives them no advantages in this school." Marshall saw several contradictions in that, but it seemed like the rest of the school day—a dream from which the verdict of the court would awaken him. Classes began with a double dose of French.
Comment t'appelle-toi?
What work does your father do? And your mother? What job will you have when you grow up? Marshall was unable to think that far. "I'd have expected better of you, Travis," the French master said, tapping the desk beside Marshall's exercise book and leaving a chalky fingerprint on the gouged wood etched with fading ink, and strode to the front of the class as a boy peered rodent-like through the glass of the door and knocked timidly on it. "Tingay, isn't it? Yes, Tingay?"

"Mumble mumble bottle," Marshall heard, and "Mumble Travis mumble," and his pen described a squiggle like a lie detector's peak before the teacher hooked a finger at him. "Well, Travis, you've been honoured with a summons to the presence."

Marshall banged his knees on the underside of the desk as he stood up, but managed not to stumble as he made for the door, though by the time he reached it he was bearing the weight of the gaze of the entire class on his back. Tingay had fled on another errand, and the corridor the length of the school was deserted. As Marshall trudged along it he heard someone scraping Bach off a cello, the shout of a master echoing over a stampede in the gymnasium, two boys yelling insults at each other in what sounded like a scene from a murder play—Shakespeare, to judge by the odd audible word. All the way along the corridor a charred sky paced Marshall.

Three older boys were wailing haphazardly outside Mr. Harbottle's office—three hindrances to Marshall's learning why he had been sent for. One he'd seen twisting earlobes in the schoolyard to extract lunch money from their owners. All three stared at Marshall as though he had no right to stand near them, and he'd positioned himself diagonally opposite them when the door beside him opened and the headmaster's secretary poked out her head, bristling with bluish curls. "Is Travis here yet?" she demanded, and caught sight of him. "Aren't you Travis?"

"Yes," Marshall said, uncertain whether she was supposed to be a Miss.

"Why are you hiding round there? Come along, step lively. Head's got other people besides you to see," she said in the process of hustling him across her office, and swung her knuckles so close to his head that he thought she meant to rap on it rather than on the inner door. "Travis, Head."

"Send him in."

Marshall didn't have time to breathe before the door was open and then shut behind him. The room resembled a very large oak chest whose interior was decorated with plaques and diplomas, their metal and glass gleaming with electric light. A sharp smell of metal polish snagged his throat. Mr. Harbottle was frowning over a letter and displaying his bald pate, which appeared to have forced its way between the twin leaves of his glossy black hair. As he raised his head with its broad nose and thick pink lips, the light slipped off his scalp like oil. "Ah, Travis," he said as if he either had to remind himself why he'd sent for him or was only now able to put a face to Marshall's name. "How are you finding it?"

His guarded friendliness would have struck Marshall as ponderous in any case, but now it seemed the worst possible omen. "Yes, sir, I am," Marshall stammered. "Fine, thanks."

"I'm led to understand you've found your feet."

This was beginning to seem like a lesson in a foreign language, and Marshall wasn't sure he was expected to answer. "Yes, sir," he said when the silence got to him.

The headmaster passed his right hand over that wing of his hair as though to check he hadn't lost it. "Your performance on television was brought to my notice."

Was that why he'd sent for Marshall? Did he feel that Marshall had somehow let the school down? The disappointed tone had crept into his voice, but then he said, "I'm told you're quite the reader."

"I guess. Sir."

Mr. Harbottle looked askance at him and apparently decided that was sufficiently disapproving. "I suppose that follows from your father's way of life. And does your mother discuss the films you watch with you?"

"She does, sir, and my dad," Marshall said, feeling defensive on behalf of both of them.

"We must hope you are given a suitably critical view of them." The headmaster let his gaze gather on Marshall, who shifted his feet and glanced down to quell them. "As it happens, I was just speaking to your father."

Marshall's nerves dragged at the corner of his mouth. "What about? Sir."

"You and he were both in court, I hear."

"Only because we were witnesses."

"Oh, utterly. It wasn't my intention to suggest you'd been hauled before the beak for watching gruesome twaddle." The headmaster pursed his lips in appreciation of his flight of wit and went on. "Your father sketched the case for me. Most deplorable. Very much the kind of situation I had occasion to refer to at assembly this morning. Or to be more precise, an example of how it develops in adulthood if it goes unchecked. I trust you've suffered nothing of the kind at Bushy Road? No undue hostility to your origins, for instance?"

"No, sir," Marshall blurted, not caring whether that was true. "You said you'd been speaking to my dad."

"That is so," the headmaster said severely, so that Marshall feared he'd provoked a lecture about interrupting. Instead, although after a weighty pause, Mr. Harbottle said, "You will be aware he went to court this morning to hear the verdict."

Marshall couldn't speak, not least because his mouth had gone awry. "You may well smile, Travis," the headmaster said. "Your father asked me to inform you that the miscreant has been found guilty on all counts and sentenced to eighteen months in prison."

Marshall's mouth went slack, but he managed a real smile before his jaw could drop too far. "Gee, thanks, sir."

"Your father tells me that your testimony was instrumental in securing the conviction. I may very well cite your action in the near future as an example of the sort of behaviour I was urging earlier."

Though Marshall felt he deserved not nearly so much praise, he didn't mind accepting it amid his euphoria. He walked out of the office feeling as though gravity had been reduced especially for him, and restrained himself from grinning at the three boys in the corridor, who had now become four. All the sounds of the school had acquired a brightness and immediacy which seemed to be addressing him; even the dark sky unspooling beyond the windows appeared as promising as a film yet to be exposed. "Notre ami américain a l'air très heureux," said the French master as Marshall returned to the classroom.

"Bien sûr, monsieur," Marshall said.

Now he was able to think what he wanted to be when he grew up, though he still wasn't sure if he would have time to be both a university librarian and a best-selling author. He settled for librarianship, since he didn't know if the French for "best-selling" was "best-selling." For the rest of the day he knew the answer to every question asked in class. The most gratifying moment, however, was in the dining hall, where everyone who hadn't brought his own lunch was doled out dollops of aggressively nutritious food to be eaten at tables as long as those in just about any prison dining scene Marshall had watched, and where he found a space a few feet away from Billy Heathcote. "Heathcote," he called through the mass of conversations and metallic scraping. "They gave him eighteen months."