The Standing Water (54 page)

‘So, Ryan Watson,
hear you’re a budding artist?’

I wasn’t sure what
‘budding’ meant, but I nodded.

‘How about you draw
the main picture in the centre of the card then the others can add bits around
it?’

‘What shall I draw,
Sir?’

‘Good question –
maybe think of an enjoyable time you had with Mr Weirton, something you did
together as a class you all liked. I’m sure he’d be chuffed to see that.’

I decided to do a
drawing of the last Bonfire Night. I sketched our guy, sat him on top of his pyre.
I gave him Weirton’s rigid hair, black shoes, dark suit. The guy snarled as the
flames licked around him. I wondered whether there was a chance – even a faint
one – that whatever we sculpted or drew might come true in real life. Maybe by
drawing Weirton tortured with fire, I could bring the teacher low or at least
keep him in hospital for a long time. I sketched an explosion tearing from the
heart, just like the one our poor guy had suffered. As for the blast that had
ripped open the guy’s head, I just showed it erupting from the ears – so as not
to spoil my skilful depiction of the face. I felt my rendering was so lifelike
that – fearing a whacking if the teacher returned – I obscured my effigy by
adding Helen’s beard, Stubbs’s pipe.

‘Eeh, you’re a
talented lad, aren’t you?’ said Mr Stone. ‘Mrs Perkins told me all about the
great guy you made. Sounded like fun – just a shame things went a bit wrong on
the night.’

‘Sir,’ I said, ‘I’ve
got an idea. The others can draw in the fireworks and maybe each person can
sketch themselves dancing round the fire.’

‘Smashing idea,
Ryan! Let’s do just that.’

The others were set
loose with their coloured pencils and felt-tips. The sky behind Weirton filled
with banging fireworks, with whooshing strands of red, turquoise, green. Stubbs
mischievously drew two flaming rockets rushing from the blaze. I couldn’t
resist adding the burning discus of a Catherine wheel chasing a boy who looked
suspiciously like Dennis. I’d decided to have the kids skipping round the fire
because I’d heard a legend dancing round something in a ring could raise up a
weird magic. All the kids hated Weirton so perhaps by prancing round him our
hate could grow, sneak from the card and somehow harm the teacher. And the card
did begin to look strange – some of my classmates were so bad at drawing that
rather than boys and girls it looked like a gang of goblins and imps were
capering round the blaze, creatures with the most wicked sneers and terrible
deformities. Creatures I’m sure would have delighted in the screams of the guy,
in the smell of roasting man-flesh.

When we’d finished
the front of the card, Stone got us all to sign our names and write a message
inside. Most were boring and predictable – ‘Get well soon’ scrawled Stubbs. In
her good-girl handwriting, Helen’s message said, ‘Missing you, hope you’re
better soon’. I just wrote, ‘Dear Mr Weirton, remembering the fun times we had,
Ryan’.

Days then weeks
went by. Everybody got better with Stone – scoring higher in English, spelling
and maths. Even the dimbos like Richard and Suzie improved. And not one
whacking was flung down! In the first fortnight or so Stone shouted himself
hoarse at Johnson and Stubbs, but such yelling became less and less necessary.
A comforting calm filled the classroom, a reassuring peace that so enveloped you
it felt like it hugged the skin. And we learned a lot. Stone told us some
interesting things, stuff we could never have guessed before. For instance, he
claimed – contrary to all logic and the evidence of our very eyes – that the
sun didn’t go round the earth, but the opposite was true. He drew a diagram on
the board, showing the vast sphere of the sun and the tiny balls of nine – not
seven as I’d thought – planets circling it. He also said the sun wasn’t – as I’d
reckoned – the size of our Bonfire Night blaze, but thousands of times larger
than our earth. What he said seemed so preposterous we had to check it that
evening in Jonathon’s encyclopaedia – and were amazed to see Stone was right! I’d
have to change my ideas about us needing Bonfire Night blazes and Christmas
lights to spur on the weakening sun. If the sun really was so big and huge, he
wouldn’t need us at all – which was in itself quite a chilling thought.

Stone cleared up a
few other mysteries. We’d always wondered where certain birds went in winter –
Stubbs maintained they hid in bumps in the snow whereas Richard Johnson
insisted they slept at the bottom of Marcus’s pond. Stone made the staggering
claim those tiny creatures flew thousands of miles to spend winter where it was
warmer in Africa and places like that. I tried to figure out how those titchy
wings could flap so far. I inched up my hand.

‘Please Sir, how
can those little birds do it? Do they hitch lifts on aeroplanes?’

Stone laughed. ‘No,
Ryan, they do it all by themselves. They were doing it millions of years before
aeroplanes were invented.’

Millions of years?
Obviously, we couldn’t trust everything Stone said. But the encyclopaedia that
evening did confirm he was right about the birds’ travels.

Not everyone,
however, was so pleased with Stone. One day, Jonathon and I went to Davis’s
shop. As he served us – as usual, ignoring our pleas for chocolate footballs
and the like – Davis said, ‘So, how are you lads getting on with our new Mr
Stone?’

‘Great!’ said
Jonathon. ‘He’s really nice!’

Davis winched his
face around as the sagging jowls and folds of skin under his neck wobbled. His
watery gaze gripped us.

‘There are folks
who reckon Mr Stone’s too soft on you lot! And I’d have to agree. Not one
walloping he’s given out in all the time he’s been at that school, not a single
one! You mark my words, there’ll be trouble brewing!’

Davis turned his
face back to his jars, the trembling tongs dipped into one, captured a shrimp.

‘You mark my
words,’ the voice quivered out, ‘with the likes of Dennis Stubbs and Richard
Johnson and young Mr Browning here, who shoved his brother off a bridge …’

I glanced at
Jonathon – his Cain’s mark stood out brightly in the dusky store.

‘Lads like that
need discipline, good regular thrashings! Otherwise, they’ll be running riot!
Not one he’s given out, not one …’

And so the old
voice chuntered until our bags were plonked by the wrinkled hands on the
counter.

‘You mark my words
–’ the ancient gaze again held us ‘– some parents are far from happy about
what’s going on at that school. Had your mum in here, young Browning,
complaining about Mr Stone’s laxity. It’s all very well making cards and
drawing pretty pictures and telling kids strange facts that are too big for
their little minds. But what happens when they’ve grown up and had no
discipline? What happens when they start mugging old ladies?’

The withered palm
reached out; we placed our ten pence pieces on its papery skin.

‘What would the
likes of Mr Stone do then? It’s his sort that are setting this country on the
road to ruin! Plenty of people here can’t wait for Mr Weirton to come back!
Good old Mr Weirton, I do hope he recovers. Last of a dying breed –’ Davis
shook his head ‘– last of a dying breed.’

‘Not one,’ Davis
murmured as we left, eager to swap the sepulchral air of his store for the smoke
and dunghill scent of outside, ‘not a single one to brighten up me day …’

Leaving the shop,
we passed the Old School, pitched in some sweets for the poor kids, if indeed
those kids were there. Then, stuffing our mouths with candies, we made for our
homes. We supposed there was no point in trudging up to Marcus’s pond to throw
any to him. I got back to my house, watched some cartoons. A little later, Dad
came home and we were all soon seated round the kitchen table. Davis was right
about our parents being unhappy with Stone.

‘That Mr Stone’s
useless! Kids need
discipline
!’ Mum said. ‘Especially young lads. Dread
to think how this country would be if the likes of Mr Stone had their way.’

‘Like it’s becoming
now!’ My father glanced darkly around our chomping table. ‘Lazy, idle loafers
on the dole, and even a lot who’ve got jobs, instead of being grateful, are going
on strike for more tea breaks or whatever! Kids sniffing glue and mugging old
ladies and dyeing their hair all the outlandish colours under the sun! The
bloody bleeding hearts letting all these niggers and Pakis and God knows what
flood into our cities! If you want a vision of the future, look at all the bad
things now and times them by a hundred!
That’s
what it’ll be like if the
bloody liberals and socialists have their way! This damned miners’ strike,
Scargil’s Red Guard – it’s just the start, just the start!’

‘An age is ending.’
Mum shook her head. ‘If Mr Weirton doesn’t come back, we won’t find another
like him. Even in Emberfield, it seems, we can’t keep the modern world at bay –
more’s the pity!’

As the days went
by, we heard little about Weirton. He was in hospital in Goldhill, and – apart
from a note he sent to thank the school for his card – he had little
communication with anyone in Emberfield. Then somebody said they’d bumped into
him in Goldhill – he was out of hospital, not looking too bad, he’d seemed
affable enough, but had dodged any questions about what was wrong with him.
Nevertheless, certain words were tossed around our part of Emberfield – ‘heart
attack’, ‘nervous breakdown’. I knew a heart attack was when something very bad
happened to the heart – I’d seen people having them on TV, writhing and bucking
on the ground. I was amazed Weirton could have survived such a thing, even if
Marcus hadn’t been in the pond. As for a ‘nervous breakdown’ – what was that?
Was it when someone got very anxious because their car stopped working? OK,
Weirton liked his car a lot, but why would a breakdown be such a problem?
Couldn’t he have just gone to a garage?

Things plodded on
as our wet spring dragged itself towards summer. Stone went on teaching our
class, we all got better at our work, and still there came no yanks into the
air, no palms pounding backsides. There was less fighting among the kids too
though, of course, it didn’t stop completely. The parents and Davis went on
complaining about Stone, went on longing for the return of the headmaster, but
the sprightly hope that had earlier sung in their voices had been swapped for laments
about the good old days of Mr Weirton that they feared were vanishing. In fact,
things got so steady under Stone life became almost dull. I didn’t miss
Weirton, but it was strange to see the days happily trickle by with no eruptions,
no reverberating yells, no shuddering build-ups to explosive wallopings. Our
cheerful monotony was broken when a computer appeared in the school. Stone set
the thing up in the school’s small library, and a queue of kids formed outside
– hushed, faces lit with awe – waiting to be allowed to lay eyes on, to touch
even, that incredible device. But Jonathon and I now knew there was no need to
steal it, and our robot was simply left to rust under its shroud in Jonathon’s
shed. In fact, there was no need for any of Jonathon’s inventions, no need for
any ark as – though, of course, it rained often – heaven wasn’t pounding all its
fury on us. Jonathon mostly contented himself with looking through his
encyclopaedia, with reading the books on science Stone ordered through the
school and lent to him.

Most excitement,
indeed, came from outside Emberfield. My dad at our table, Jonathon’s father in
his armchair would wave their fists, shout out words like ‘bloody leftie
miners, blasted strike, hang the bastard leaders, unions, banned’. In his shop,
Davis spoke of ‘prison, the cat, bringing in the bloody army’. The papers in
Davis’s store – which I could read so much better by now – talked of
‘communists’ and ‘subversives’. I didn’t know what communists and subversives
were, but from what the papers said I thought they must be very bad. On telly,
policemen marched in ranks like a big army – many even had shields, like those
of knights, though they were made from plastic not metal. They faced mobs of
what my father called ‘strikers’ – burly men who wore jeans and rough shirts
rather than the suits and ties of my dad and Weirton. I hadn’t known there
could be so many police in the world – we only saw them wandering in twos round
Emberfield. But there they were – pushing back the strikers with their shields,
waving long sticks called truncheons, like bigger and smoother versions of the clubs
Stubbs’s gang had beaten me with. My father cheered as those truncheons smashed
down on strikers, as the TV showed their shocked bloody faces. Sometimes the
police chased strikers on horseback – again looking like knights of old,
wielding their truncheons like swords. Dad would shake his fist, yell to urge
those hooves on.

‘Go on, get that
lefty bastard! Crack his bloody commie skull for him!’

As the strikers
stumbled, were trampled by those mounts, Mum would say, ‘Remember the children!
Mind your language!’

But as my father
roared in triumph, he barely noticed her; he continued to shout as the voice
from the telly went on quavering over its strange round vowels.

May arrived and we
had more news about Weirton. It was news that caused wide grins to break over
Jonathon’s face and mine; news that caused the adults to scowl, more bitterness
to sound in their complaints, that even caused some to say they felt ‘let down
by’ the headmaster.

‘Maybe this blasted
modern world has even infected our good old Mr Weirton!’ Dad said, giving his
head a shake at our kitchen table.

Not only had we
found out Weirton wouldn’t come back to the school, we’d also discovered the teacher
would be moving far away – to the north-west of Scotland. He’d bought a cottage
and tiny farm – up a mountain, some said, on a remote island, said others. My
grin had inched higher as I’d pictured the vast stretches of land between
Emberfield and the headmaster’s new home – the spreading wastes of plain, hill
and mountain, the barriers of jagged peaks, wide lakes and huge rivers. I was
sure it would take weeks to cross such a wilderness. I also smiled when I
thought how cold Weirton would be in his cottage so far north, when I thought
of the year-round ice and snowy blasts he’d have to contend with. But that was
not all the news. Weirton – and this had really got lips tutting, tongues
clicking – and his wife were getting divorced. They’d sold their house, split
the money; the wife and son would move into a flat in Goldhill.

‘And I always
thought Mr Weirton was a bastion of traditional values!’ Dad shook his head
again as we went on munching. ‘It’s like some absurd, irresponsible hippy dream
– drop out, get a bit of land, flee your duties!’

‘Yes,’ Mum said. ‘He’ll
be dancing naked round standing stones next!’

I didn’t know what
standing stones were, but such an image of Weirton summoned so much laughter I
almost sprayed my family with the food I was chewing.

I was in Davis’s
store when the ancient shopkeeper leant over his counter, murmured to a
customer, ‘Always thought there was something not quite right about our Mr
Weirton. He upheld discipline pretty well; I’ll give him that, but some other
things …’

With shakes and
shuffles, the shivering body inched itself further across the counter before
Davis whispered, ‘Had a chequered past, you know, gallivanting around the
world. And when he started fishing in that pond … just confirms what I’d always
said about him not being quite all there. And
now
what do we have?
Another fatherless child! Wouldn’t surprise me if in seven or eight years’ time
that lad’s running wild, mugging old ladies! I’d like to see how
those
rascals would turn out –’ the old head nodded at Jonathon and me, ‘– without a
father’s discipline!’

Weirton’s
resignation meant the school needed a new head. Perkins and Stone both went for
the job. The parents were all praying Stone wouldn’t get the post. In Davis’s
shop, in the houses of Emberfield, also – I guessed – in the foul-smelling pub,
there were rants and laments about Stone’s ‘lack of discipline’, about how ‘the
school would descend into chaos with that joker in charge’. But, in the end, it
was Stone who got it. (And, even better, it was confirmed he’d go on teaching
our class when we became upper juniors.) The rumour was the vicar had put in a
positive word for him – something I found strange considering Stone’s sighs and
shooting eyebrows whenever we sang our sacred songs.

A joyous summer
passed. With no Weirton to return to, we could really enjoy those endless weeks
which, nevertheless, didn’t seem quite as endless as the previous year’s. But
still we had sunny days, blue skies scattered with fluffs of cloud. The
holidays ended, and Darren, the brother and all their year started at the Big
School. They were surprised to find no one’s head was plunged into a lavatory.
Darren even tried the infamous cream cakes, and – rather than spending a week
locked in the loo – suffered little more than mild indigestion. As for kids
getting lost and wandering for days in the Big School’s vast knot of corridors,
nobody seemed to lose their way for much more than one hour.

Quite a few of our
own myths also disappeared. Maybe a couple of weeks after the new term started,
Jonathon and I were walking past the Old School. Like always, it had its high
foreboding windows with their spikes of blackened glass, its cracked flagstones
and grassy tufts in the yard. But that yard was full of men – men with loud
voices, in rough jeans and overalls. With no apparent fear, they strode about,
called to each other in the school’s dread enclosure, as if it was the most
natural thing to march beyond those forbidden walls and shout and linger in
that playground, which until then had been the territory of spooks. Over the
next days, things got even worse. Showing no terror of the ghostly teacher and
her cane, they actually entered the school building. They knocked out the shards
in the windows, and even started ripping objects from the inside. A pile of
dusty, ancient-looking chairs and desks was one day in the yard. A couple of
days later, there was a mountain of tiny toilets, loo seats, lavatory doors and
old-fashioned tanks with chains. We soon saw heaps of torn-out blackboards,
rotting beams and rafters. Jonathon and I watched all this goggle-eyed. I’d no
idea what would happen to the poor kids and their teacher. Would they simply
float away over the fields, try to find another school to haunt? Why didn’t the
teacher catch one of the men, give him a good whacking with her see-through cane?
But those men just went on ripping stuff out and shifting it away then it was
all churning cement mixers and ladders and paintbrushes and new windows being
put in. The Old School was turned into a house called – very imaginatively – ‘The
Old School’. A couple moved in. As far as I knew, neither had their sleep
disturbed by enraged teachers, wailing kids.

There was also what
happened with Marcus. His pond had nearly dried up in the summer, but the
autumn showers had given it back some strength. Around the time school
restarted, its dark waters would have probably covered the floor of my bedroom.
Despite Weirton’s escape from the pond, Jonathon and I still sometimes wondered
if Marcus might be in there. Perhaps Weirton had somehow slipped out of his
clasp. And we hadn’t seen the teacher – it was possible his body bore gouges
where teeth had ripped his flesh, that that body was streaked by savage
maul-marks. But then – one early October afternoon – we saw a sight that made
my jaw plummet, my heart hammer. A man, in overalls and long wellies, was
standing – was actually daring to stand – right in the middle of the pool.
Though the man was tall, and Marcus’s waters were diminished, I was shocked
those waters only came up to his knees. The man was dangling some kind of
measuring device into the pond. We went on gawping as he stood there for maybe
two minutes before striding out, utterly unharmed. The next day, walking to
school, we saw a strange machine parked on the pond’s shore – some sort of engine
growled and thumped, a hose went into the pool, a hose that led to a lorry that
looked like a petrol tanker. As that engine hummed and thudded, as it shivered
and shook, my mouth fell open, my eyes bulged. The water was going down fast –
as if that hose was a straw some greedy kid was sucking and the pond a glass of
drink. More pupils joined us, staring as the last of Marcus’s waters
disappeared, the hose even making a noise like a child slurping up his last
bits of cola. All that was left was a crater of sludge. My heart banged; my
lips wobbled; cold prickles of disbelief ran over my skin.

‘But what’s
happened to Marcus?’ I stammered.

‘Well, if he was
ever in that pond, he must be in that lorry now.’ Stubbs nodded towards the
tanker.

The following day,
I watched an even more incredible event. A digger – all massive wheels, roaring
engine, shuddering steel limbs – scooped out all of Marcus’s mud. With just a
few lunges of its shovel, it then went beyond Marcus’s crater, carving so huge
a trench that – in a matter of minutes – it was impossible to see where his
pond had lain. Over the next days, as men strode and shouted, as machines growled
and puffed, that trench was filled with rubble, sealed with smooth tarmac,
swiftly becoming a road. Those men and machines were soon crawling over the
field beyond, and, during the next year, houses – their red brick shinier, more
modern than that of our homes – gradually grew from the earth. But, a couple of
weeks after we’d watched Marcus’s pond drained and gouged, we had some news
about that boy. The brother knew someone who played football for the Big
School. His team had played another school from far, far away. And, apparently,
on that side had been a lad called Marcus Jones.

‘Really!’ I said,
in the Brownings’ lounge. ‘Are you sure it was him?
Our
Marcus!?’

‘Dunno.’ The
brother shrugged, raised his eyebrows, wrinkling his Cain’s mark. ‘But there
can’t be too many boys around called Marcus Jones.’

‘Did your mate say
how he looked?’ I said.

‘Yeah, I did ask
him. Did sound a bit like Marcus – freckles, dark hair, but the lad didn’t say
much more than that really.’

‘If that
was
Marcus’ – Jonathon spoke, nodded slowly – ‘that means he was never
ever
in the pond!’

‘Hang on,’ I said,
my lips starting to quiver, my heart starting to bash. ‘We know there’s no
Drummer Boy, no witch’s hand, no Lucy. There were probably no ghostly kids in
the school, no Marcus in his pond. Maybe that also means that on the way to
Salton there are no sleeping Scots, Knights Templars’ curses, Henry VIII …’