EXCERPT :
PROLOGUE
A breeze carrying a hint of damp earth, newly mown grass and a faint beery odour from the Hare and Billet lightly brushed Matthew Kreasey’s face. His eyes watered as he stared through his open car window at the distant glow of street lamps along Shooters Hill, fields sprawling to the gaunt twelve foot walls of Greenwich Park. Something urged him to start the engine, drive away while he could, but he needed the street lamps' glow, the fields’ freshness breathing into him, their space, their quiet, the anonymity late evening brought to the heath.
Waitin’ for you teacher, even on your heath…Class 12d…
The glow, the freshness had gone.
His ex-students, he was sure, were gathering from the wrong side of town with the only thing their breadline households didn’t deny them, tantos and long-bladed hunters, bush rangers, like the one staff-room chatter claimed to have pricked, pierced and slid as a blade through butter eight inches into colleague Margaret Fielder’s lower back. She’d misjudged, turned to the blackboard to kindle a spark of enthusiasm in them for ‘Marvell & The Metaphysical Poets’ but it had been their last lesson on a Friday and they’d wanted out - out on the streets.
Gently, Kreasey ran his hand along the frame of his car window, longing for it to be the window of his rooms in the Old Rectory again, near the quiet villageschool of Padbury. It had overlooked a cottage garden from where once he could breathe the perfume of night scented stocks. If only he could hear the breeze whispering once more through the copper beeches of ages past, not the horns of that flash coupe and the juggernaut vying for supremacy on the tarmac of Shooters Hill. That tarmac led down Blackheath Hill to run-down back streets... to those youths in History 12d for whom, in a moment’s missionary zeal, he’d chanced teaching. He bit his lip. At forty-five, he shouldn’t need the sixteen-year-old who’d so far been his passport to them.
He could hear Eddy Fallows’ voice. It had to be Fallows… telling him to forget Amy and that Amy was “theirs”, which seemed to reduce her to no more than class 12d’s mascot. He could even see those same burning eyes searing into their prey, the eyes of “Thickneck” as he’d privately christened the tallest. And Thickneck’s voice would always haunt, carry in it calculation; the incessant calculation of how he and his class sycophants could best pull the carpet from under teacher’s feet.
‘Mix the sleepers with them in the brown bottle, mister Kreasey,’ Fallows had said. ‘Eat them all up, then you won’t need no cuttin’ up.’ That loud assertive laughter... he could hear it... anyone could hear it - if they listened... swelling from the chorus who always sat in their rows of chairs and grinned when Fallows grinned… yes, they were laughing and now their volume was ramming its way through the shell of his car, its message forcing its way down his ears in their warm moist breaths.
‘Remember them corridors Kreasey? Night time if you like, even when you don't see us, we’re here. Come on! Don’t be anxious,’ the class, now Fallows’,seemed to insist; their invitation carrying their hate.
But a distant, gentler voice whispered… Matt? You can be amongst them - with me!
‘Amy? Amy, is that you?’ he called towards the heath, his hand touching the window pane as if it might have touched the smooth face of his student lover. But she was still a girl. He shouldn’t rely on her. He’d shut 12d’s voices out, just as he’d shut all his doors and windows. And one day he’d be able to drive to the college again, get out of his car, even enter those corridors. But for now he could still hear Fallows’ voice ringing in his ear, telling him to take himself back to his ‘nice quiet flat’ where he’d be ‘safer’.
Don’t listen, Matt… came that other softer voice… And remember the little diary I said I’d keep for you - “Mister Kreasey’s Demon” ? I’ll keep it Matt. I’ll keep it until, one day, we’ve found the demon and killed it.
‘Amy? Amy?’
CHAPTER ONE
Kreasey nudged the spectacles back where they’d slipped down the bridge of his nose. He peeped through the squat brown bottle of tablets wondering whether he might need to take Diazepam for life. Young Amy would, sooner or later, find him an embarrassment beside her peer group once he was seen to rely for his strength on capsules rattling in a bottle which he couldn’t hold without a tremor in his hand.
The face of Eddy Fallows seemed to loom up beneath his chin and then confront him, nose to nose, until he felt he could almost smell the garlic on Fallows’ breath.
‘Keep eatin’ them pills,’ he was sure he could hear Fallows and his following urge… ‘then you won’t need no cuttin’ up...’
There was no bad breath. It was the memory of Fallows that would always smell foul. He’d heard only a rapping on his bedroom door.
‘Kreasey? Mister Kreasey?’
The tone had risen nearly an octave, the rapping more insistent, distracting Kreasey from his thoughts. He held tight the cap to his medicine.
‘Mister Kreasey?’
our girl... cuttin’ up... Fallows seemed to interrupt. The knocking was becoming louder, more urgent. He held the cap tighter.
‘Anyone at home?’
Cut you, teacher... cut you nice... nice!
‘Mister Kreaseeeey!’
The only owner of a female voice - with access via the stairway to the inner door of his flat was his neighbour, the now retired and widowed doctor Mallaby. It had to be her, a woman fiercely proud of her elegant first floor flat, in Wisteria House; itself a small mansion bearing an imposing stucco facade and hinting of late Regency among the fine houses on Vanbrugh Park. She wasn’t going to be ready for the culture shock when she pushed open his unlocked door to be confronted by the chaos in his conversion on the other side of the party wall.
If he stayed silent, she might not poke that enquiring nose in, see his sweat-soaked sheets, the shabbiness into which his once presentable first floor flat had slid, nor the kind of tablets on which he’d continued to depend since his dismissal.
‘Can I come through? I’m not very good at shouting!’
His neighbour had invited herself down his inner hall and now she stood in his bedroom doorway, resolute, a lean old widow retired from the wards, no hint of a cream cake or a contour in her five-foot-five, hair fine, silvery, impeccably groomed, bun tied and clipped tastefully, spine straight, a paragon of deportment, invincible, that delicate bridge of her nose delicately nosing. He hadn’t had time to conceal the sweat-soaked sheets and those sedatives lay scattered in his bed coverings like currants in a Spotted Dick - he the Dick.
‘Sorry to disturb you. I - I know you haven’t been too well with your -’ her eyes had fallen to the stray capsules on the carpet close to her exquisitely polished brogues, ‘your troubles at the college - shall I tell your visitor you’re - indisposed?’
‘I’m okay - tail end of flu - anything wrong misses - doctor Mallaby?’ he corrected, noticing her face newly sculpted with disgust.
‘It’s - it’s the student girl again - she’s standing in the lobby. Doesn’t seem to distinguish between the ground floor bell and the first floor,’ she added, blinking the more rapidly over her intelligent eyes, wincing as though she wanted to spit out soap which had crept on to the tip of her tongue.
Mallaby appeared to have billeted herself, as if quite unable to disengage until she had a prognosis delivered into her hands explaining the likely progress of the exotic snake that was sure to slither across her hand-tufted Axminster and irretrievably shed into its pile some unsavoury impedimenta.
‘I could tell her you’re not here,’ she tried.
The doctor looked hopeful. She might just succeed in ridding the first floor of his sixteen-year-old visitor. It wasn’t so much that her ‘middle-aged-dismissed-teacher-cum-neighbour’ might have been baby-snatching, but that “the student girl” might bring in the type of mud that Mallaby must have always noted on the heels of stilettos - the mud of youth’s promiscuity, mud too late to blemish the doctor but always liable to depreciate her investment a tad at the upmarket end of Blackheath’s Vanbrugh Park.
‘It’ll be Amy - a pupil,’ he tried.
Doctor Mallaby hadn’t blinked, her back still erect, her face tight, discerning, a long, dried prune - but a quality prune.
‘She’ll have brought her coursework authentication sheet. As her - her former teacher, I’ve still to endorse it - in absentia’ he added, hoping to sound plausible enough to distract his neighbour from what she would regard as the more lurid truths starting to worm their way out of the backstreets and up onto the hallowed soil of her beloved Wisteria.
‘It’s your property. You see who you like mister Kreasey,’ she said turning from him, her lips pursed rigid to contain her defeat and anger.
‘... managed to keep your balance across a gravel drive - on those?’ Mallaby’s voice had resurrected itself at the bottom of the stairway.
‘Is it okay then? If I see ’im?’ Kreasey heard the younger voice try again.
He wondered whether Amy had appeared before Mallaby in her very highest heels, the ones that gave her an extra three-and-a-half inches of height over a world that had always seemed to look down on her. On her first visit, he’d noticed, Amy was slightly undernourished and shivering in a short skirt with a slit up the side. She’d been clutching her essay to her low-necked top and he’d wanted to, but couldn’t, tell her that she’d made him happy enough - just by appearing on his doorstep with her essay and those eyes which spoke of deprivation and yet which held, for him, openness more beautiful in itself than any he’d seen in any student before.
He heard first the outer door, then doctor Mallaby’s door shut. He waited for “Charlie” perfume and the new voice bubbling on a fire of youth and pheromones to fill his room.
‘Remember these?’ Amy chuckled.
Amy’s newly varnished fingernails, like red-tipped washing pegs, pinched each trouser leg of the boxer shorts he’d worn for lunchtime badminton sessionsat the college. She was suspending the shorts to the side of her face, that openness and expectation in her greyish-blue eyes so good-natured and irresponsible, as he wanted to be.
‘Haven’t seen you in these yet, have I? Want me to...’
He’d lost her words, could only smell the sweet perfume masking a vague hint of TCP in the room. He wished the tablets he’d taken hadn’t left him staring so foolishly at the lips of a vibrant sixteen-year-old in his bedroom
‘You know, there's a spot on your face?’
‘Is that what you see?’ she responded. ‘Are you being my teacher, or something else?’
‘I am your teacher’, he said, as he stood looking at the girl. ‘And I don’t like spots - not on your face.’
‘You want me to be perfect? Like my essay?’
‘You - you are perfect - well, almost,’ and before his eyes there seemed to parade the mass of pimply post-pubic youths - her set in History 12d.
She was searching his eyes, confused. He recalled better times, those moments when her face had shared that open comic side of her lovemaking with him. He so wished he could deliver her from the dross that was her peer group. Unblessed though their encounters had been, he couldn’t forget that she’d tried to be his passport to those from 12d... those who always seemed to be gathering, getting closer...
Mr Quiet, Mr Whisper, leave our Amy, she’s our sister...
He smiled to pretend he hadn’t heard a voice which he couldn’t share with her, smiled to melt away for her the teacher and the pedant in him. She’d have been the closest thing to a goddess if she could have granted him passage amongst the thick necks, the close-crops and the ear-ringed who only needed to understand.
But the more her glossed lips moved and the longer she stood rooted in the middle of his bedroom holding up his boxer shorts, the more it was clear she was no Persephone offering to deliver him from that cadaverous underworld on the teacher’s side of the desk. All that was left was to wonder what Amy could really want... of him....
‘Well, are we going to see you in them?’ she smiled, still holding his shorts out like her trophy.
But as he watched her lips they seemed to shape like those in a poorly dubbed film where the voice is out of synch’ with the words… reminding him now to “eat up” all his tablets and that, then, he wouldn’t need to be “cut up”.
Kreasey managed to turn away from her smile, wondering whether the 2.5 milligram mustard-coloured tablets to which he’d switched might have left him more confused this time than the slow-releasers. One thing was for sure, from where he’d been lying in bed, half-mesmerised by Amy’s swaying of his shorts, he must have been gripping the neck of his medicine bottle under the top sheet. It was only now that he was aware of something he should have noticed before.
The bottle’s cap, shoulders and neck... they seemed to feel thicker... the neck of the ugliest in 12d; the one who might have grown most resentful of his sleeping with Amy and now right inside his flat... beneath his top sheet... brushing his left thigh, cold … cold as steel.
He tried but failed to snap the neck of the bottle between his fingers.
‘Can’t break it? Too weak, teacher?’ The voice of 12d’s most idle, Jake Blacksmith, seemed to be escaping from the bottle where the lid had been partly loosened.
He was forty-five, Kreasey thought, middle-aged and he still needed a sixteen-year-old girl to open the bottle for him. Perhaps they were right. Perhaps he should eat up all his tablets. He was going to need the next so badly when Amy had left his bed and the night seemed as if it feared returning to morning.
Every tablet that huddled inside the bottle seemed to be a face - not just Jake Blacksmith’s - but every shaven head and ring-in-the-nose that noisily packed out room 329 where he’d once had to cope…
‘Long night teacher,’ they seemed to chorus. ‘Long is for lithe, panting tiger waitin’ for you.’
Something warm and fleshy had covered his eyes, the whole mattress had sagged deep beneath him, his body sprung with the bed... all was dark as moonless night.
Kreasey turned his head to left and right to escape the form spread-eagled above him. It wasn’t going to go away. He could feel himself sinking deeper into the mattress beneath the warm pulsing belly that sagged between his thighs, over his stomach and chest. Reflex forced him to stretch his arms back over his head and try to take hold of what seemed undeniably, thick highly muscular forelegs, the creature’s strength overwhelming. He could feel. a moist tongue filling out his ear, searching, squelching around until he loathed himself for beginning to enjoy the feeling...
He could hear History 12d’s jeering and laughter... mounting...
‘... Little Percy isn’t going to play today?’ a chirpier voice asked, silencing his musings.
This voice was clearer, this time occupied his room rather than his head and came, he was sure, from the girl he so wanted to be with him now… with him to take away the great tiger which seemed to have pinned him to his bed.
He felt another leg but, for sure, this one wasn’t muscular and there was no more rub of fur over his face, nor that unwelcome odour. It was smooth... chiffon smooth... a teenage girl’s inner arm, a slight muscle in it flexing against his inside leg.
‘Isn’t he coming out today then? What’s wrong with our little -’
It was definitely a girl’s voice but now the words had stopped – as had the massaging. The other hand was no longer cupped over his eyes. Above was that familiar face, not as usual; pale and slightly undernourished but flushed and confused. It was Amy… Amy Carter, arching her body off him, her top and skirt strewn behind her and caught on the end post of the bed. Her shiny crimson shoes, one scuffed at the toe, had been kicked on to the other side of his carpet, his brown medicine bottle now in her hand, she frowning at the label, concentrated.
‘Diaza - what? Di-az-epam. Is this why Percy doesn’t want to play with Amy today?’
‘Amy, what do you want? I suppose it should be crystal clear but -’
‘You’re sweating! I mean - down your face. There’s tablets in your sheets, and tablets - hey! How many of these have you had?’
‘Do you have to hold those up on display - as well?’
‘ Look! What’s the matter with you tonight!’ she said, throwing the bottle away from him until it somersaulted into the folds and rattled.
‘Isn’t it obvious? Haven’t I been displayed enough? Before the Principal? Before the Board? Before 12d? Whose exhibit am I? Course, all you notice is what you see, what you can massage, until you’ve got what you want.’
He hated himself for the ugliness of what he’d said but, say it he had to; if only to test why he and she had found themselves so intimate, so soon and at such different ages.
‘You telling me I don’t have feelings, or something? Amy replied. ‘Is that what you’re telling me? Oh you’ve got a lot to learn, “mister Teacher”!’ she said, trembling as she pulled on her skirt. ‘If you’d had a bit more feeling for boys who weren’t brought up to speak all la-di-da like you, and didn’t dress in tweeds and be some - some monk hidden away in “whatever-you-call-it House”, and if you hadn’t give them bad grades ’cos they didn’t know no better, 12d wouldn’t have pulled the plug on you. They wouldn’t have become like -’
‘A circus?’
‘See what I mean! You think they’re animals! She said, vigorously jerking her top down and struggling to angle each foot into her best stilettos.
‘Just animals - is that what they are? Is that all I am? Some animal? I’m an animal ’cos I tried to make up for you getting the sack?’
There was nothing he could say to her.
‘You think I’m shit, ’cos I hopped in bed with you?’ She said. ‘You think 12d are shit - don’t you? And why? I’ll tell you why - sir. ’cos like me they happen to have poor parents who knew they come from losers, who were born on a conveyor belt, born to work with machines, to become machines on cars down Dagenham or stuck at Tilbury dock or sweating to stitch cardboard into cartons and pack cans into them in some soft drinks factory until a zombie at clocking off. And mothers washing and ironing rich people’s clothes for them until they don’t know what pride is no more - all ’cos blokes in 12d just happen to have woken up to matchbox houses in streets where you don’t see a tree like them you did near your nice little village school. That’s what they have round ’em - not tight-arse Blackheath like you! It is - isn’t it? Tell me I’m wrong Matthew! Tell me it’s different! Can you?’
He wanted to tell her he’d had to work for everything he owned, that he’d had humble parents who’d deprived themselves of the luxuries that others enjoyed so that they could keep paying his fees at a private school and who’d always told him you could work for something better. He wanted to tell her how he detested the ‘hard-luck’ stories the street wise in 12d had manufactured with a grin lingering as long as their unfinished homework. But if he tried explaining, it might be those capsules speaking again.
Even if it wasn’t the effect of his prescription, then he still couldn’t speak - not while he watched the girl who’d sweated in walking nearly two miles from her back street all the way up Blackheath Hill, across the heath until reaching the elegant façades of Vanbrugh Park. She had tapped the lion-head knocker against the newly-glossed door, stood uneasily on those steps which led up between pillars that dwarfed her, and argued her way passed doctor Mallaby’s immaculate flat; all to make love to him… to “make up” for her getting him summarily dismissed.
He watched her standing in the middle of his bedroom. In her anger she’d shaken her watch strap until the wristwatch had whipped across her face startling her.
Kreasey tugged on the boxer shorts, the mattress a trampoline as he dragged his feet across the crumpled sheet which sent another bottle of Diazepam rattling again as he approached her. He bent to pick up her watch, then examined the pink and plastic bargain-shop strap lying before her.
‘Broken,’ he observed, ‘like a lot of things round here don’t you think?’
She was backing away... as if believing she could deny that moments ago she’d been close enough to bring him to orgasm. He watched her, arms folded beneath her breasts, trembling. He accepted her eyes, her distance, her watching ... like one cat watches another. But as she waited for her wristwatch, Amy Carter was just a little cat now - one that had been in more scraps than he by the time he was sixteen but whose eyes were reddened as she stood, stubbornly trying to hold her tears from him.
‘I’ve a jeweller friend. Commutes to Clerkenwell. He’d do a decent repair - for peanuts, if I talk to him,’ he said, holding the wristwatch in front of her.
She seemed unable to speak. It was the first time he’d glimpsed what lay behind her brashness. Now her eyes, behind the film of water, seemed only to shift as if struggling to find some answer, confused eyes, torn between fleeting instincts of adolescent fancy, love and hate.
‘It’s not just ’cos of you sleeping with me that 12d made it difficult for you,’ she began, ignoring his offer to repair her watch. ‘I was just the last thing you took off ’em. I know I’m to blame for that. But - if you want to know - what started the trouble was the low grades you give them, telling them their writing was “hieroglyphics” when they couldn’t do no better, and you never having a laugh with them, looking all bored at your desk ’cos they were miles away from all the literature and dream world you live in. You was too quiet for them Matthew! Can you understand that? Too bloody quiet! They could feel your disgust - they knew you’d given up on them!’
‘Like some of their streets and their homes gave up on them?’ he said, trying again to return her wristwatch to her.
‘It’s not as easy as that - is it? It’s you!’ she said, oblivious to the wristwatch. ‘Look at yourself! Hidden away up here with all these books and all this fancy-looking furniture. You’re ancient! Some kind of monk you are! You live in the past - look at your tweed jacket hanging up on that there door - and look at him!’ she said, pointing to a moustachioed Elgar on the box cover of a CD disk. ‘How are you going to understand them in 12d if all you listen to is - this - “The Dream of Geron - Gerontius?” Jesus!’
‘Jesus won’t help you - not just at the moment. Elgar might.’ he said, feeling insecure in his smile.
‘Right. That’s it. I’m not having you laughing at me! No bloke laughs at me. Not now. Not never!’
‘Amy -’
‘12d were right about you -’
‘Amy, I was only -’
‘You deserve to be on them pills!’ she said, whisking the sheet off his bed, sending loose capsules scattering. You don’t want nothing to do with my friends and nothing to do with me. And by the way, you couldn’t get nothing up - not even if I’d stayed all through the night with you.’
There was a moment’s silence.
‘What was I to you then?’ she asked in a slow measured way that humbled him. ‘Just a piece of chewed up meat in your bed, was I ? Not quite right for that snotty doctor woman in the next flat? Not quite matching with your nice fireplace and all this grand design round your ceilings? Not -’
‘Amy -’
‘No! Don’t give me “Amy”! My mum’s name’s Amy. You sound,’ she swallowed awkwardly, ‘- you sound like that bastard stepfather of mine! “Amying”Mum, “Amying” her when he wanted her to forgive him for giving her a “little shake” every other week he come back from the Rising Sun at nights, stinking!’ she added, wrinkling up her nose as though the smell would be with her to her grave. She tried to break the rest of the strap from her watch as if it was the breaking of the tenuous bond she loathed between her stepfather and her mother.
‘And all he did was rob me of my real Dad’ she said. ‘Mum should have stuck with him. He was worth a hundred of that Mickey of hers - and ten of you!’
Kreasey wondered whether the concession to ‘ten’ of his own kind - whatever his kind was - left him a ‘bastard’ too. For the first time he wanted to be near her, put his arm around her. Both seemed fraudulent.
‘I only wanted -’
‘Shut it Matthew! Shut it! Shut it!’ she cried, banging the watch against the wall until she’d done more damage to her knuckles than the watch face. He could see her other hand trembling, slipping off her cheek as she tried to hide a tear.
He picked up the watch she’d finally dropped..
‘I’ll - I’ll get you a new one. Gold strapped. Amy! What the - ’
She’d smashed her fist through the window, leaving dagger-shaped shards of glass askew in the frame, her blood smeared on glass, an insidious trickle of red travelling down her pale white hand, a bead bulging into a drip from one of the big glassy rings she’d worn to give her the style she thought she needed.
‘Don’t get me nothing!’ she shouted, turning on him, her face ashen, her eyes so full of that strange wildness that had at last run freely as tears, her make-up a mess of colours streaming into one another like blood and gravy at the end of a poor man’s dinner. ‘But get this mister - Kreasey - never laugh at me! My second Dad did that to Mum, when his belly was full of beer, laughed at her, after he’d shaken her for not wearing the skimpy tarty things from his ex’s wardrobe.’
‘Come on Amy - I’m not your stepfather! I’m just me ! Trying to get you and that hand of yours down to the bathroom! Okay?’
‘Get off me! Get off!’ her screech came raw. ‘I don’t need your help!’ she said, flinching from the arm he’d tried to curve round her shoulder, tottering on her heels. He respected her distance, let her nurse into her stomach the bleeding fingers she’d wrapped in the top she’d pulled out of her skirt; wrapped, like her fifty pence worth of chips.
Kreasey reopened the door she’d slammed on him, tried to step over the stars of blood on every other tread until he’d started to catch up with her as she reached the bottom of the stairs. But she’d turned again... her eyes full of pain.
‘I’m warning you! Don’t follow me!’ she shouted up to him.
If she’d turned again she might have seen his eyes, filling with water. But she wouldn’t have heard the mindless choruses nor seen the stone-faced griffins that could hold those inane grins for him from nine in the morning to four in the afternoon, through the evenings, the long nights, every week, every year.
CHAPTER TWO
Kreasey was going to need the car. Amy could still be hobbling across the heath, splinters of window glass still embedded in her hand. She’d lost blood, she’d still be overwrought, probably exhausted as she tried to make her way between the dips and rises that had pockmarked the heath since early quarrying between Vanbrugh Park and the War Memorial at the boundary walls of Greenwich Park.
He scuttled down the iron treads of the fire escape, his heart panting with the unaccustomed exercise as he leapt every other tread to get down to his car parked on the gravel drive. He hadn’t wanted his neighbour to intercept him in the communal hallway between flats - not when teacher was running after girl young enough to be a daughter and not, doctor Mallaby would remind him, when he still had in theory a professional duty of care.
As the sun swept across the windscreen of his car he thought he’d seen a pig’s head suspended by rough string from his driver’s rear view mirror, the boar’s snout stuck with a hunting knife. His heart raced but then he’d been running and palpitations were common just before he took his tablet. He dismissed the image of the pig’s head. Anyway, Fairfax had said there could sometimes be mild hallucination until the treatment fully kicked in.
He was ready now. If he drove straight out on to the heath he could still have a good chance of spotting Amy and getting her down to hospital.
‘Nice to see the invalid out and about! Is it going to start up?’
It was his neighbour, doctor Mallaby, standing in the crescent of the house’s gravelled drive, black lacy shawl supported over arm - she clinically clean.
‘Sorry?’ he queried.
‘Your car,’ she said, ‘See you’ve decided to bring it out of mothballs!’
‘Indeed. Indeed,’ he replied, hoping the economy of words would free him to start up the car before he lost Amy on the heath.
‘Do you good to get out of that flat. You could do with some red in those cheeks.’
He smiled, wondering whether those bright eyes of hers had noticed any sign of the pig’s head he thought he’d seen.
‘I’m off to the conservatoire.’
I’m off to the abattoir, he managed to bite his lip.
‘Why don’t you follow me? Mister Kreasey?’
‘Sorry. I was daydreaming.’
‘I said, why don’t you follow me? Come along to the lunch-time recital. Only recorded music of course but it’s not just for pensioners like me you know -invalids can benefit! You’ll hear an early recording of Vaughan Williams’ Sea Symphony - next best thing if you need a tonic!’
The doctor’s pun hadn’t escaped him but he wasn’t ready for polite company, and the real invalid was young Amy Carter who’d be stumbling across that heath, confused and badly cut.
‘Well? Mister Kreasey? Is that door ever going to fully close? And - is the doctor going to divert you?’
There was something in her expression which balanced delicately between maternal pity and medical concern. He needed both; for the demon’s chorus was returning, the twenty-five pairs of eyes that were coming to take the measure of him as they did when he sat behind his teacher’s desk, a good six foot long…as one day his coffin would be…
‘See, teacher? The doctor woman’s got you sussed ain’t she?’ the voices of 12d seemed to combine… ‘She knows what we’ve known all along. She thinks you’re mental! You’re not fit to drive across that ‘eath Kreasey... as our Amy said, you’re not fit to follow nobody.’
That dryness was over his tongue, the roof, the whole of his mouth. He couldn’t swallow, only feel his heart thumping. The more he willed himself to be calm, the more his heart laboured in the walls of his chest.
‘You’d better not drive for a moment,’ he heard as he felt the design of Mallaby’s shawl drape across him and became aware of her trying to keep the driver’s door open to take his hand off the steering.
‘I’m okay. It’s okay!’ he said, embarrassed by the attention, impatient to get driving across that heath before he’d lost Amy.
‘I know what you’re taking,’ she said. ‘The capsule I found under the hall carpet. It’s one of the common benzodiazepines - I’d say T-Quil or Valrelease. More likely the latter. You’re suffering from some form of acute anxiety state, I’d say, mister Kreasey.’
‘Matt.’
‘Matt, then. I think you can see, I wasn’t being entirely flippant when I said the invalid could do worse than accompany the pensioner to the recital. You do need that kind of diversion.’
‘Another time, Ira.’ he said, gathering her shawl back over her arm for her. He started the engine.
‘First time!’
‘No “mothballs”!’ he smiled back at her, pleased that the engine had started from cold.
‘You’re - you are keeping to your regimen, are you?’ she asked, bending forward into the car.
‘Like a saint!’ he smiled, smelling a sedate perfume close to him. ‘And I’m okay to drive! You enjoy the Vaughan Williams, Ira! I’ll be there in - in soul!’ he said, finally slamming closed the driver’s door.
She’d opened the door again.
‘Look. Just remember, you’re living in the flat next to a doctor. A pensioner now, but a doctor. Don’t be too proud if you need any help!’
He smiled, a little wearily this time and then turned to look through the windscreen.. Before him was the narrow exit in the garden wall to the fields which would soon open out before the bonnet of his car. He was conscious of the doctor standing on the gravel. What he really wanted to tell her had to remain a secret. He drove off.
‘I need her, Ira!’ he shouted into the shell of his car, gripping the steering still harder. ‘D’you find that so strange? he continued, as if his neighbour might have been beside him to hear his confession. “I need my sixteen-year-old ex-student who’s hobbled away from your smart flat in Wisteria House on her crimson stilettos, with her Cockney twang and her hand cut where she fisted my window. It doesn’t matter what the principal and his board of governors say. I need her eyes to smile at me and bring me their life. Now they’ll be a mess of tears, eye-shadow melding into mascara, lip gloss smudged over her cheek and she runs, somewhere across this heath she runs – away from me!’
Kreasey circled twice around the heath. There’d been no sign of Amy making her way across the fields and now, as he approached Blackheath village for the third time, there was the added frustration of having to pull up sharply for three mongrels who, perhaps unsettled by the impending storm, had dashed across the road. A father, still on the fields, was drawing-in a kite, his boy scuttling into the back of a small estate as the first hailstones rattled on the windscreen. Crisply dressed office juniors had started scurrying off the streets for paper-bag lunches from the patisserie, their mentors allowing themselves a subtle quickening of step and shaking off umbrellas as they disappeared into the doorways of wine bars.
He switched the wipers to double speed. He took another look, then quickly wound the window down, slowing the car so that he could glance again at the figure running ... almost limping. The person had stopped sheltering in the porch of All Saints church to run for the bus which was slowing to the stop outside a smart row of Victorian shops along Royal Parade. The runner’s hair was matted, rain running down the forehead, dripping off the nose... it was a girl all right, carrying her shoes, her bare feet slipping through the grass, a rag of a handkerchief flapping round her right hand, a low- cut top clinging to her where she’d already been drenched. The stylish Gucci stretched across her bosom had become commerce’s mockery of her. It had to be Amy.
Kreasey pulled up, leaving his car half on road, half on field, door gaping open on Blackheath Vale. He ran to make ground towards her.
‘Amy! Amy!’ The wind snatched her name from him, pellets of hale pecking and stinging his face, but she’d slipped on the wet grass in front of the church giving him his opportunity to gain more ground.
‘Amy!’
She’d seen him but she’d picked herself up and was sprinting again to her bus, not bothering with the grass and mud sticking to her leg where there was a slit in her skirt. Those wretched mongrels were back on the field, circling and barking ... as if, to them, he and the girl who’d slid on her side were both part of their own circus where humans showed their tricks to best effect. Perhaps the dogs were right and it was all an entertainment deserving their barking. For, surely, what he was doing wasn’t his style - if he had any left - not sprinting after a scantily dressed girl just so that he could seek her forgiveness for the way their friendship and their intimacy had ended, nor to draw from her some tender assurances, some quick fix. For the first time in his time-tabled life, he was afraid that nothing could be time-tabled any longer.
Amy had reached the bus, was pushing through others to get on the platform, she fighting to get away - from him...
He squeezed between the passengers trying to get through the doors but succeeded only in getting a brief touch of bare wet calf.
‘Amy! You don’t have to run - not from me!’
‘Leave off!’
‘Who are you running from? It’s not me - is it?’ he shouted up the stairs, oblivious to the onlookers.
‘Leave off me! I told you!’
He could only watch her pale legs and then the ankles and balls of her shoeless feet disappearing up the stairwell before he became aware of himself again, squeezed between the scrums of passengers nattering round him at the bus’s door. The driver was turning to him, leaning forward over his metal pulpit.
‘Look mate. If you’ve got problems, I don’t want ’em on my fucking bus! All right? If you want a bus, you wait for the next one. Understand?’
Kreasey looked from the driver to the front seats where some of the passengers were sitting. There was an old man wearing a flat cap, resting both his hands on the curve of the walking stick before him, he studiously looking ahead at nothing. Assuredly, he had heard the driver’s language but with the disgust that said, “In my day it was always manners maketh man”. Then there was a couple, looking at him as if a shade more melodrama would give them that injection of joie de vivre which had washed out with the first two years of marriage. And now the bus driver, himself, was pointing a cigarette-stained finger at him as if he was about to be recruited into Kitchener’s army.
‘Off! I’m closing the doors!’
But it wasn’t the pointed finger or Kitchener that worried. It was the other faces he thought he’d caught a glimpse of at the back of the bus... strangers and yet... half familiar…
The doors concertina-closed in his face, forcing him away from the platform. Kreasey tried to push them open but the bus had started to move off. He stepped back and looked up again at the windows lining the top deck, wondering whether the face behind the hand wiping mist from the window could be Amy’s.
‘Who you running from? Who Amy?’ he shouted up at the windows.
He beat his fist against the body of the bus. It was useless.
He watched the vehicle until it turned down the hill into Blackheath village. A wicker seat on display outside Pine Interiors tumbled over in a gust of wind and somersaulted down to the gutter while the hanging sign of the Princess of Wales seemed to be the only thing waving goodbye for Amy.
He looked across at the porch of All Saints church where he’d first seen her running from shelter. The wind from the open heath took his breath away. He let the hailstones sting and melt down his face until he had to turn from the wind to gather his breath. But it had gusted in his ear blotting out the sounds of the village and the road that would lead down to New Cross and the eyes of 12d until something else came to fill that silence.
The voices, they seemed to be laughing this time. He fancied he could see again those faces he thought he’d glimpsed at the back of the bus, the misted windows, teenage hands wiping away the condensation,
juvenile grins pressed up against the glass like grotesques and, amongst the griffins, a face that looked like that of class 12d’s hero, Eddy Fallows.. The only thing Fallows had ever stirred was chaos in classroom 329 and now he was leering at his ex-teacher, his expressionless lips moving mechanically and, from those lips, that warning which came now like a chant whose errand was as cold as steel…
Kreasey walked, bending forward against the wind, thinking only of being inside his car again, of slamming the door closed on those he was sure to be hiding from him somewhere out there on the heath. Another more persistent gust had flapped open his jacket making him turn to free himself from his tie which had blown into his face. And then he realised he was looking at the porch of All Saints a third time.
He stood, not noticing the wind, tempted to walk instead towards the porch. The shelter there seemed more than his car could afford him... so complete... needing no wind to carry its message. But behind the church windows there were more faces, again like grotesques and, from them, the voices were telling him he must return to the college.
If he didn’t return, walk that same corridor, sit in room 329, alone, in the dark, where at least he could answer to his conscience, then the disgust of his colleagues for his sleeping with Amy would always stare him in the face, go to bed with him - for it was obvious now, Amy wouldn’t oblige. He wouldn’t look back towards the village. He didn’t want to see another bus like the one Amy had boarded, nor the wind making that pub sign swing hopelessly backwards and forwards. He’d return, drive through the village, through the main street... towards the college... tonight...
Kreasey shook and picked at his keys before groping for the ignition. Yes, he still had the duplicate to the small tradesman’s door at the rear of the college’s Mowbary Building. Tonight he’d go, when the adult extra mural evening classes had finished at eight-thirty. After that, anything moving near room 329 would have to be picked up by the CCTV cameras.
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