The Perils and Dangers of this Night (4 page)

She might as well have slapped her husband in the face.

'What do
you
know?' he blurted at her. 'Of course he
doesn't
want
to! None of them
want
to! It's nothing to
do with what he
wants
! What do
you
know? When you
can't even tell
this
–' and he crashed the nastiest, ugliest
dischord on the piano '– from
this
!' and crashed another
horrid, ugly chord. 'I mean, what do
you
know?'

There was a long silence. Wagner broke it by struggling
to his feet and limping from the fire to the foot of the
stairs, where he collapsed in a heap beside the wheelchair
with a terrible groan, as though the effort had nearly
killed him. Mrs Kemp blinked, speechless for a moment.
Then she had the gumption to lean down to the dog,
rumple one of his grizzly ears and say, 'Well, Wagner old
boy, I know exactly how you feel. Me and you, I guess
we're both ready for the scrap-heap.'

Dr Kemp recovered himself quickly. He smoothed back
his hair and then wiped his hands down his face, as
though washing his anger away. He cleared his throat
and inspected his nails carefully, unable to look across
the room and meet his wife's eyes or indeed the eyes of
the small boy who was sitting on the sofa.

'You're right, of course, my dear,' he said at last. He
tried a joke. 'Not that you're ready for the scrap-heap –
neither you nor Wagner for that matter. I mean, it's been a
long and rather hectic day for all of us, and we're all tired.'

He closed the lid of the piano very gently and crossed
towards the fire. 'Go upstairs to your dormitory now,
Scott. Get yourself undressed and washed and ready for
bed, and I'll be up in five minutes. Go on now.'

I stood up. As I paused at the foot of the staircase, from
which I was usually forbidden, Mrs Kemp took a quick,
gulping breath and said, 'Perhaps Alan would like to stay
with us, in our spare room? It must be awfully dismal, on
his own up there in the dorm.'

There was a prickly silence. Dr Kemp swivelled a
bilious eye from his wife to me and back again. 'Don't
mollycoddle,' he said. 'The boy won't come to any harm.
I'll look in from time to time to see that he's all right.'

She sighed, pursed her lips, and said, 'Well, Alan, for a
few days, try to think of Foxwood as your home, if you
can. Goodnight, sleep tight.'

She smiled so beautifully at me that my heart seemed
to rise into my throat. Hoarsely, I said, 'Goodnight, Mrs
Kemp,' then trod up and up the stairs and into the
darkness.

I stopped on the landing, turned and looked down. Dr
Kemp was kneeling in front of his wife's wheelchair.
With the same hands which had banged the piano so
cruelly a moment before, he removed her shoes with the
utmost tenderness and began to massage her feet.

The man bent to his wife's feet and kissed them, as though
seeking her love and forgiveness. She placed her hands on his head, loving,
forgiving.

It was bitterly cold upstairs. At best, during term-time,
the huge iron radiators gave a feeble warmth. Now they
were cooling, groaning and sighing like dying beasts. In
order to save fuel through the Christmas holiday, the
headmaster had turned off the boiler as soon as the boys
had all gone home that afternoon. I was in the bathroom,
wearing only my blue-and-white-striped pyjama bottoms.
Reflected in a tarnished mirror, I looked very thin and
small in the big room: skinny white body, tufty red hair,
bare feet on bare lino. I leaned over one of the rust-splashed
basins – there was a row of fifteen of them,
each with its own little mirror in front of it – and brushed
my teeth in the icy water. Behind me there were six
deep, yellowy enamel baths standing on clawed feet, their
taps gleaming in the glare of a single unshaded overhead
bulb.

Of course I was alone in the bathroom. In term-time,
every night was bath night for one of the dormitories, so
that every boy bathed twice a week – and then the room
was noisy and steamy, with naked slippery bodies
splashing and shouting whenever Miss Hayes allowed
them the leeway to do so, or if Mr Buxton was on duty
and the boys played up. And sometimes, when Dr Kemp
came tip-toeing along the corridors after lights-out and
heard the boys whispering when they should have
quietened down and gone to sleep, he would burst into a
dormitory and demand that whoever was talking should
get out of bed, put on slippers and dressing-gown and
follow him to the bathroom – where the offender would
lean over one of the baths, lift up his dressing-gown, drop
his pyjama bottoms and be beaten very crisply with a
cane or with the flat of a wooden clothes-brush.

I looked at myself in the mirror and saw the room in
the reflection. For a few seconds I remembered with equal
vividness the warmth of the comradeship I'd shared
there, and the whistle and sting of the cane.

The door swung slowly open.

I watched it in the mirror. A boy stood in the doorway,
in pyjama bottoms, barefoot.

It was me, it was my reflection. But then it wasn't me,
it was a boy I didn't know. And when I turned he'd gone.
There was no one, only the black mouth of the corridor
and the wintry breath it exhaled.

Shivering, I turned off the bathroom light and stepped
into that darkness. I padded past the empty dorms, past
one of the lifts, almost the length of the old house, and
came to my own dormitory. It looked even barer and
bigger than it had in the afternoon, when I'd sat and
watched from the window as the other boys left, because
now the curtainless windows were black, just mirrors of
my own swift and silent movements around the room.

I had myself for company. No ghosts: although for a
moment I wished there had been one, to dispel the utter
vacuum in which I was marooned. Again I seemed to
catch in the corner of my eye a ghost of myself, a flicker
here and a glimmer there of a small boy in stripy
pyjamas, a swift, silent figure moving through a row of
tall black mirrors.

I pulled back my counterpane and was about to slip
into bed when I felt a lump under my pillow, and I took
out the little transistor radio.

With a furtive glance over my shoulder, where the door
of the dorm was ajar, I adjusted the ear-piece into my ear
and switched the radio on. It whistled and crackled and
hissed, until I turned the tiny dial with the tip of my
finger. And then suddenly – like a signal from another
planet far beyond the empty cold room in the empty cold
school, light years away from the dark woodland which
surrounded the school and stretched for miles and miles
into the distance – there was a blast of pop music.

It filled my head –
so here it comes, here comes the
night
– it flooded my body. I closed my eyes, shut out the
room and the school, and was nowhere.

So I didn't hear the footsteps coming along the corridor
towards the dorm, didn't hear them come closer, didn't
sense the opening of the door . . .

Dr Kemp came in. He must have seen me standing in
the furthest corner and been surprised that I didn't turn
to acknowledge his presence; surprised that I ignored
him, tapping my foot and twitching my hips in an oddly
provocative way.

He crossed the room. Too late to try and hide the
radio, I saw his looming bulk reflected in the window.

I froze, unable to choose between a futile attempt to
disguise what I was doing or a simple admission of guilt.
He stood so close behind me that his breath was hot on
my cold wet hair and neck, and he seemed to pause and
inhale the scent of my body. And then he heard the tiniest
sound: a tinny persistent beat, so faint it could almost
have been the flutter of a pulse inside his own head.

He listened. We both held our breath. He saw the wire
running from my hand to my ear; he saw the radio.
'Scott!' he barked.

He yanked the wire and the ear-piece popped out. I
dropped the radio onto my bed. The music was suddenly
loud, and I stared up with horror, to see the man's face
so close to mine, to smell his breath and the peppery
odour of his body. Dr Kemp barked again – 'What do
you think you're doing!' – and grabbed for the radio,
picking it up with a look of disgust as though he were
handling a toad. He tried to turn it off, but his fingers
were too big and clumsy for the dials and the volume
went up and up until – 'Damn the horrid thing!' – he
banged it onto the floor with sudden impatience.

The music stopped. The silence was very cold.

We both looked down at the little plastic machine on
the floor without saying anything. At last Dr Kemp
cleared his throat and wiped his face with his hands, and
he said, 'I don't suppose it's broken,' in an odd, soft voice
which was probably the closest he could come to saying
he was sorry for what he'd done. I bent down and picked
up the radio. It fizzed in my hands until I switched it off
and put it on my bedside locker.

'Time for the prayer,' the man said.

Every night, just before lights-out, Dr Kemp would
come to all the dormitories, one after the other, and say
the same prayer while the boys stood in their pyjamas by
their beds. The same short prayer: I'd heard it several
hundred times during my years at Foxwood. And still,
each time, I puzzled at the words. Now I put my hands
together and closed my eyes.

Dr Kemp said, 'Lighten our darkness, we beseech Thee,
O Lord, and by Thy great mercy defend us from all perils
and dangers of this night. Amen.'

That was all. I pulled back the counterpane and
blanket of my bed and slipped between the sheets. What
perils
? I wondered. What
dangers
? I'd sometimes been
miserable at the school, and often I'd felt the almost
physical pain of homesickness, a hurt inside my chest and
an ache in my throat when I thought of my mother and
father and the faraway warmth and familiarity of home.
But what were the
perils and dangers
I needed to be
defended against? That from time to time a big bullying
man would burst into the dormitory and march me down
the corridor to the bathroom and beat me on the backside
with a clothes-brush? That the same man might sneak up
behind me and snatch my radio and throw it on the floor
and smash it? If so, the prayer hadn't worked. Now I
looked up at Dr Kemp, who had turned towards me and
was leaning close.

The man touched me. He'd never done so before, but
this was the first and only time that I had been alone in
the dorm with Dr Kemp. With my blanket pulled up to
my chin, I watched wide-eyed and afraid as Dr Kemp
came closer and the man's right hand came down to
touch my head. For a long moment the hand was heavy
and still and very hot. Then, as both of us held our
breath, as though neither of us knew what was going to
happen next and had no way of controlling it, the hand
moved very slowly and gently to my cheek and down to
the scratch on my neck.

Dr Kemp suddenly straightened up and stepped back.
His voice was curiously hoarse, so that again he cleared
his throat as he said, 'Your hair, I thought your hair was
wet.'

He crossed to the window and stared out: there was
nothing but blackness and his own reflection. I watched
him without moving my head, because I didn't want the
man to look back at me and maybe come looming close
again. And, mixed into the dislike I had for the man, I
remember I felt the tiniest and oddest twinge of pity for
him – perhaps, I wondered, it was strange and sad for the
headmaster too, to be alone in the dormitory with just
one small boy, now that all the others had gone home
and the big old house was all but empty. Another term
was gone. Another year was nearly over. Dr Kemp
looked older and sadder. From the corner of my eye, I
saw how the man appraised himself in the black mirror,
saw that his hair needed cutting and his clothes looked a
bit too big for him. For a few more moments, the two of
us – the man at the window and me sheathed into my
narrow, cold bed – held our breath and waited in the
stillness of that room, so utterly different from one
another, except that we were human beings alive and
breathing in that mid-winter night, cut off from the rest
of humanity by miles and miles of deep, dark woodland.

He moved to the door, faraway at the other end of the
dormitory. He clicked off the light, said, 'Goodnight,'
and closed the door. I heard his footsteps soft and slow,
down and down the corridor. Then silence.

I lay on my back and stared into the darkness. Not
even a streak of light came under the door, because this
time the headmaster had flicked off the switch at the far
end of the corridor.

The window rattled a little, as a gust of wind stirred
the trees of the forest. An owl hooted. Silence.

And just then, the only comfort I could find – for the
ache in my throat and the hurt in my chest were almost
more than I could bear – was to reach to my bedside
locker and feel for the transistor radio. I held it close to
my ear, clicked it on and turned the dial. Even this little
bit of solace was denied me. There was nothing. A
crackle of hope for a split second, a pop and a faint
high-pitched whistle – then nothing but a hiss in my ear.

Was there nobody out there? Nobody? Was I alone in
all the world with Dr and Mrs Kemp?

I squeezed my eyes shut, and quite deliberately, not in
a daydream or a blurry reminiscence, I recalled my
father. It was Christmas Day, my birthday, a year before,
and my father had given me an air pistol. We were in the
hazel copse at the bottom of our garden, and he'd
arranged a stack of empty tins – golden syrup, rice
pudding, custard powder – to do some target practice. It
was a clear, cold morning: no snow but a dusting of frost.
My father was wearing brown corduroy trousers and one
of his green army pullovers; in the sunlight which fell
through the trees his hair was coppery bright, and his
eyes shone with the joy of giving his son such a grand
present – a Webley & Scott .177 – and showing me how
to use it. His hands on the pistol, strong and lean and
very white, moulding mine to the matt-black heft of it,
teasing one finger to the trigger; his voice, calm and quiet,
as I aimed at the tins and fired; the soft, plosive puff of
the pistol and the ping of the pellet on the can. We'd
practised for an hour, my father and I alone together in
the most secret part of the garden, and then, when he
stopped for a smoke, I'd slipped down to the stream with
the pistol – where, as I waved it carelessly around me, up
into the trees and into the undergrowth, for something
different to shoot at, I spotted a vole which was plying
from one bank of the stream to the other. I sighted on it,
as my father had taught me to sight on the tins. I took a
breath and held it, as he'd told me to do. I gently
squeezed the trigger . . .