The One Safe Place (30 page)

He walked around the outside of the field in case there wasn't a gap in the hedge that would admit him to the churchyard. Houses flapped washing above their back fences at him as he followed a cramped path worn down to bare earth between knee-high grass and weeds blossoming with varieties of litter. Ever since passing through the school gates he'd felt as though he was being followed, but the only other person on the path was a boy whose head was carrying a pair of earphones along the hedge toward the last corner Marshall had turned. The sunlight was gathering in the black material of Marshall's blazer and weighing his shoulders down, the narrowness of the path pressed the heat and the unruly greenery against him, but he didn't mind how far he was being forced to walk when it would bring him to his father.

The end of the path was blocked by a supermarket trolley which someone had almost succeeded in bending in half. Marshall lifted it out of the way and walked alongside a high wall holding back a mob of houses, to the gates in the shape of halves of an arch. A wide path wearing a thin coat of moss led him between them and past a silent church.

A fallen ornamental urn lay like an unexploded bomb among the pockmarked monuments. A band of tipsy crosses turning green surrounded a statue of Christ which had sprawled on its back, one hand raised from chest level as though beckoning to passersby to assist it to its feet. The red footballers beyond the hedge had been doubled by players dressed in green, but because of the distance the running clump of them was smaller than ever. The diminution of their shouts struck Marshall as respectful. He was remembering the funeral, to which he and his mother had been accompanied by his father's parents and by everyone from the party except the crime novelist and her husband, and by other people he'd never met before. He'd felt slowed down by the crowd, and unable to release his feelings, but now he was walking slowly because it seemed right and because he was thinking what to say to his father.

"Dad, I've come without mom this time because I wanted to talk. Maybe I can tell you stuff I'd rather not say to her, you know, stuff we'd rather not worry her with. I don't know if you can talk to me. I'll understand if you can't..." He was murmuring to himself as he walked the length of an impenetrable rank of bushes which separated the old graves from the new. Maybe he would have to say it all again, but it didn't matter. He came to the end of the bushes, whose foliage was such a dark green it looked shadowed by the open sky, and saw the field of white headstones. He knew exactly where his father's was, and opened his mouth to greet it. But all the memorials were lying on their backs except for his father's stone, which wasn't there at all.

His legs jerked him toward the spot where it should be. He was moving so uncontrollably that he couldn't avoid treading on a beer can, several of which were scattered among the toppled headstones. He heard the metal beginning to uncrumple itself as he stumbled to the row where the newest graves were. His father's memorial had been smashed against another, leaving bits of words on chunks of marble littering the turf. ALD TRAV HUSB FATH MUCH LOV. Worse still, some of the mounds had been kicked apart. One was his father's, which smelled of urine.

"Dad, I'm sorry," he mumbled. "Look what they did." Surely it didn't matter that his words couldn't force open his lips, which felt as swollen as his eyes were growing. "You're okay, though, aren't you? I mean, you're still there?"

A raucous cheer went up from the football field and vanished into the indifferent sky. Marshall thought of the urine seeping down through the earth to his father, and then couldn't bear to think of it. What he was imagining could never have taken place, which had to mean his father wasn't there. He wasn't anywhere. Marshall turned away from the destroyed grave and began to walk very fast toward the other exit from the graveyard, as if he might outrun the memory of what he'd just seen. That route led home eventually, but he didn't know where he was going: certainly not back to the school. Perhaps he would never go back.

Susanne thought she was addressing the question of how to communicate the banality of violence. If she didn't teach the course she had undertaken to teach she would be letting her students down. She'd found she couldn't use commercial movies, at least not yet; the violence in them seemed too cartoonish and stylised—too much of a betrayal of the reality she knew. Even films by Godard and Bergman had struck her as playing at violence, and so she'd borrowed documentaries from Bea in Modern History. Now she was showing footage of riots in Africa: no stunts, no exaggerated sound effects or dramatic makeup, no excitement or even audience involvement with events which had already and unalterably taken place, just the dull squalid spectacle of people injuring one another, unceremoniously falling down when shot or trying to protect themselves from blows with parts of themselves that would only break. Captions ran along the bottom of the screen, and a commentator's voice described the political context in greater detail, but the words were irrelevant to the dismal fascination of the images. This was how life was, this was how people always would be. The film repeated a scene of a man covering his head with his hands as he was clubbed to his knees, this time in slow motion, and then the credits began to crawl off an otherwise blank screen. Susanne watched them all, then sent the tape forward and waited until it rewound to zero, and switched it off, and stood up to face the dozens of students who were gazing at her—somewhat warily, she thought—from their folding chairs lined up across the square white almost featureless room. "Depressing, wasn't it? Not the kind of thing to watch if you're feeling suicidal, right? But that's the way violence should be, on film, I mean. That's what it's like, grubby and mindless and pointless."

She hadn't planned to say any of that when she'd stood up. It was her way of approaching her theme, she told herself. "I'm not saying every film should be like that. Realism in fiction's a convention like any other, we've talked about that, haven't we? Yes. But I'm coming around to wondering how much we should expect anyone who makes a movie to be true to their own experience, which maybe should include watching the kind of material we've just watched..." She sensed herself drifting off her chosen theme again, and brought her mind back to it and talked for a while, though she had an odd sensation of not really hearing herself. "Listen, that's enough from me," she said abruptly. "Anybody any thoughts?"

Her students shifted, trying to be unobtrusive. Some of them uncrossed their legs, their bare knees hiding to some extent in holes in their jeans. The class wasn't usually so hard to rouse; what could she say to enliven them? Even Liu was gazing at her hands, crossed in the lap of her ankle-length black dress. She glanced up, and then around her, and parted her lips, but that was all. "Yes, Liu?" Susanne prompted. "You were going to say?"

"Sus—Mrs. Travis?"

"Susanne is fine, but Suse is out," Susanne said, meaning to help. "Sure, go ahead."

"I was only..." Liu glanced at her neighbours again. "Well, I only thought that if, let's see, you might want us to, I don't know, watch films by ourselves for a while and write about them, we could."

"Why should I want that, Liu?"

"Well, certainly, if you don't, of course..." When Susanne continued gazing at her, unsure if she'd finished, Liu had another try. "It was only an idea, but if you'd rather not watch them..."

"Because it makes you feel uncomfortable, you mean?"

"No, it isn't that. That doesn't bother, well, any of us, I shouldn't think."

"I wouldn't say that from your faces. Are you going to let Liu do all the talking? If I've been embarrassing you I'd rather you let me know."

That made most of them look anywhere except at her. "Okay, come on," she said with a roughness that was intended to demonstrate they needn't be reticent. "I know you didn't sign up for me to put you on the spot like this, or to listen to me going through therapy either. I'll try to do my job better if you'll allow me the occasional rant, is that a deal?"

There was an outbreak of uneasy surreptitious movements after which most of the students nodded in agreement—encouragement, even. "We weren't embarrassed," Liu said. "We were just worried about you."

"You've been doing fine," said Pik, the solitary white of the African students. "My father didn't do half so well when the bomb, when we lost my mother."

"You needn't try so hard for us unless you have to for yourself," Rachel said.

Susanne felt her own silence filling her throat. For the moment she was too emotional to speak, especially now she'd belatedly noticed that Liu had been wearing black for weeks. The knock at the door couldn't have been more welcome, and nearly everyone turned gratefully toward it as Alice, the departmental secretary, let herself in. "There's a call for you, Susanne."

"Who is it, do you know?"

"It's from the school."

Susanne experienced a twinge of nervousness which seemed more automatic than meaningful. "What about?"

"She didn't say. The secretary, that is. She'd like you to call her back."

"Do you mind if I call her now?" Susanne said to the class. "I'm sure it can't be anything much, but..." They were smiling and shaking their heads and holding out their hands like stepping-stones for her. "Thanks for being you," she told them. "See if you can tell me something I don't know about the movie we watched when I get back."

There really was no reason for her to hurry, and so she didn't, not much. It wasn't like the day of the verdict, when she'd felt compelled to race to Marshall, only to realise belatedly that he wouldn't have wanted his friends to see his mother picking him up from school at his age, never mind telling him what she had to tell him. She unlocked her office at the end of the corridor and went to her desk in the room full of books. She glanced at the topmost page of the pile of essays she had to grade, and then she dialled the school. Hurrying herself into a nervous state was one thing, but deliberately taking her time in order to reassure herself there was no urgency didn't quite work. As the phone at the school began to ring she made her hand relax on the scrawny plastic neck of the receiver. This time the secretary allowed the ringing several repetitions before she put a stop to it. "Bushy Boys?"

"Hi, it's Susanne Travis. Marshall's mother."

"Oh yes, Head wanted you to call. He's rather busy at the moment, I'm afraid. Will you hold on for a few minutes, or shall I ask him to ring you when he's free?"

"Can't I have just a quick word? I'm in the middle of teaching a class."

"Teaching." That seemed to alter the situation in Susanne's favour, until the secretary said, "Oh, you mean
students,"
as if she'd been tricked. "I 
think you're best off waiting till he calls you. He's got some parents in at the present."

"Can you tell me what the problem is at least?"

"I've just told you." After a pause the secretary said, "I get you," and then was silent for too many seconds. "I think that's for Head to say," she said at last.

This time Susanne couldn't relax her grip on the fragile plastic. "Either tell me yourself or put me through to him. You're a mother, aren't you? Even if you aren't you must know how I'm feeling right now."

"The thing is, Mrs. Travis, Marshall..." Susanne thought the secretary had decided once again that it wasn't her place to give out the information, until she said, "Bear with me one moment. I think Head's nearly free."

The pause lasted considerably longer than one moment, and was almost more than Susanne could bear. Even when the secretary said, "Putting you through now," that was followed by nothing but static. Suddenly afraid that someone would think she wasn't there and cut her off, Susanne started parroting, "Hello? Hello?" Most of the static ceased, and she heard a man saying, "Thank you for coming in. I wish all our parents were as involved." The hollowness which must have been contained by his hand cupped over the mouthpiece made way for his voice. "Mrs. Travis? Dennis Harbottle here."

"You wanted me to call you about Marshall."

"Thank you for responding so promptly. Mrs. Travis, are you aware of his whereabouts?"

Susanne consulted her watch, having disentangled the strap from the thread which held the button on the cuff of her blouse. It was quarter past three, which meant that school still had twenty-five minutes to run. "Isn't he with you? At school, that's to say?"

"I am very much afraid not. It appears he has not been seen here since the end of the morning session."

Susanne had been standing in an awkward posture which she was scarcely aware of having frozen into, and now she hardly sensed her body lowering itself onto the chair behind the desk. "Did someone—" The idea was so terrible she had to force it out of her mouth. "Did someone take him away?"

"A relative, do you mean?"

"Not a relative, no. We've no relatives in Britain. Someone. Anyone up to no good."

"I think not, Mrs. Travis. I rather fear that Travis was operating under his own steam."

"You're saying he wasn't with anyone."

"I believe those were my words, yes," the headmaster said in a tone which made it clear she wasn't supposed to question his usage. "I have ascertained that Travis was seen by several of his friends leaving the school premises without authorisation at the start of the lunch period. Would I be correct in assuming you had not provided him with a letter?"

"Saying he needed to leave, you mean? He'd have handed it in if I had. Are you telling me it's been three hours since he went missing?"

"The teacher who took his first class of the afternoon is only with us for the week, and I regret that Travis's classmates neglected to point out the absence. I assure you they will be dealt with appropriately."

"Their fault, huh," Susanne muttered, and raised her voice. "Did anyone ask them if they know why Marshall did what he did?"

"I think I may have the answer to that, Mrs. Travis. Shortly before he was last seen I had occasion to reprimand Travis. He was to take you my letter inviting you in to discuss his behaviour. From his attitude during the interview I would conclude that he may be seeking to avoid doing so."