8
Monday, 23 April 2012
She leant shut the front door, her shopping bag in her arms, and conjured up the reassuring aroma of overcooked vegetables, disinfectant laced with the collective body smells of a hundred boys. She imagined so many innocent souls, their hopes and dreams before them, sleeping soundly above her.
At this time of the evening, Reception, a partitioned area built before her time, was closed and she would be in charge of greeting the few visitors; a time she liked best.
At the turn in the staircase something made her pause. She surveyed the cavernous hall below. Everything looked in order.
Her shoulders bowed, the woman’s silhouette on the expanse of green gloss wall had no head; distorted further by her shopping bag, she could have been the minotaur.
She wended her way upwards in the school where for decades she had been a trusted housemother. At each landing she extinguished lights behind her, leaving darkness in her wake. She did not wince at the weight and awkwardness of her bag, or the long climb. The effort was a price of existence. It must be paid. She focused on the step in front of her, unblinking. It was the way she approached her work and her life, unstinting and unswerving.
The crêpe soles on her lace-ups expressed stolid reliability. Despite her heavy tread, she knew no one would hear her on the frayed linoleum. She never disturbed the boys: growing children needed sleep.
Three floors up she did stop. She liked this window. It had fascinated generations of boys because, cut across by the stairs, it disappeared into the floor. The architectural necessity fascinated her too. It was possible to see through the gap to the stairs below where a boy was waving. James, William, Nicholas, Mark, the long list of boys had over the years merged into one lovely boy with all of their best qualities. A boy with the aura of an angel. She pressed her face to the glass.
The car park was dark and deserted; no staff or parents here tonight. She observed without pleasure new leaves on the plane tree. They would screen off the school from houses in Weltje Road. She resented nosy parkers. Soon the weather would be warmer. She liked cold days shortened by dark nights when she could wear clothes that covered her body. She held the bag to her chest and resumed her climb.
On the top floor, opposite a long unlit passage, was a door. Through shamrock-petal-shaped holes carved out of the upper panels a faint light sent elongated shamrock shapes along the low ceiling. These did give her pleasure. She flicked another switch, but the strip lights above did not respond. She left her bag by the door and felt her way along the passage, her shoes sponging on the linoleum. Six doors, three each side, had the same shamrock holes, dark outlines in the wood with no light beyond. She opened each door, ducked her head into the room, withdrew and closed the door. At the last door she went in.
The room was dark but for orange light washing in through a window. She retrieved a rubber-covered torch from the top of a cupboard by the door and, keeping the beam low, revealed three iron bedsteads. A paperback book lay open on the tumbled blankets of the window bed, spine up. She folded down a page to mark the place and shut the book, laying it on a bedside cabinet next to a leather-bound travelling alarm clock. She gave the book a stroke as if to underline the action.
She lifted a pillow that hung over the foot of the iron frame, plumped it, averting her face from a cloud of dust and then restoring it to the bed. Tutting, she pulled up the blankets and batted out creases. A bundle of material was jammed against a bed leg. She got down on her hands and knees and dragged out a shirt, no longer white. She struggled to her feet and, in the wardrobe, unhooked a hanger and draped the shirt over it. Throughout this procedure, one apparently familiar to her, she was quiet as a mouse. The perfect housemother, she was fond of reminding herself. She closed the curtains, aligning the fabric so that the pattern of a trellis twined with flowers with red petals was unbroken. Sleep tight, don’t let the bugs bite. A whisper on the breath, she pit-patted out and closed the door.
She returned to the stairs and reached a key down from the lintel above the locked door.
‘I’m home.’ Despite the sing-song gaiety in her tone her expression remained impassive. If she was concerned by the lack of response she did not betray it. Two strip lights with frosted plastic casings spotted with dead insects cast a bland light on a corridor with a vermilion runner along its length.
In a bright utilitarian kitchen she unpacked shopping with the efficient air of fulfilling a routine, lining up her purchases on a blue Formica table: a tin of dried milk, two boxes of frozen ready meals, baked beans, a jar of chocolate powder, six pork sausages, a box of tea bags and the London A–Z street atlas. Apparently no longer mindful of being quiet, she stowed the groceries away, banging cupboard doors and opening and shutting a large fridge and freezer. Now she appeared to want to draw attention to her presence. She secured the bag on a hook behind the door and straightened a yellow apron hanging there to reveal a yellow smiley face. When she spoke, in a confiding voice, it might have been to the apron. ‘I told you I wouldn’t be long.’ The intention perhaps not to reassure, but to be proved right.
Carrying the street atlas, she went down the passage to a room like the boys’ dormitories, furnished with an iron bedstead, a plain wardrobe and bedside cabinet. Here the bedding was immaculate, a wool blanket tucked so tightly that only a cardboard figure could have comfortably slipped in between the starched white sheets. The woman shrugged her coat off and arranged it on a hanger in the wardrobe using the same spare movements with which she had handled the shirt. She regarded herself in the wardrobe mirror and shifted her rayon top so that it did not bunch around her waist. She smoothed a hand over a swollen stomach: not a promise of new life, but the bane of middle age. She gave a perfunctory brush to one leg of her black cotton trousers and a pat to her hair – a serviceable style demanding the minimum of effort. In the hallway, head up, shoulders back, she approached a door at the end.
Her hand on the knob, her determination seemed to falter. She straightened her jersey needlessly and, the A–Z in one hand, tapped on the door. Rat-a-tat-tat, the jaunty tattoo at odds with her stony demeanour. No sound came from within and after a moment she opened the door.
‘There you are.’ She addressed a spacious room in which she seemed to be the only one present. It reeked of adhesive and paint. She grabbed a long pole resting against the door jamb and, thrusting it upwards, slotted it into the fastener of a skylight and hauled open the casement.
‘Let’s have some fresh air,’ she told the pole.
‘You’re late.’ A disembodied voice.
Darkness obscured streets and tiny lights twinkled on the shimmering surface of the river. They lit up rooftops, exposing missing tiles here and there and chimneys prickling with aerials; signals, traffic lights and scraggy trees sent shadows over the roads. Hammersmith Bridge dominated the scene.
‘The river looks as good as new.’ She put out a hand towards the model but then withdrew it as if commanded not to touch. She waved it over the blue and grey painted plaster of Paris. Stiffened peaks and troughs moulded to illustrate the wash of a passing boat beneath the looping span of the bridge. The water level had lowered with the ebbing tide. Figures hurried along tiny streets. A trapdoor in the river dropped down with a bang and a skulled head emerged, grey eyes venomous behind thick glasses.
‘Got it?’ The working jaw straining parchment skin hatched with lines. Fluffy brown hair tufted like a young bird’s in a fringe around the tonsure.
‘Of course.’ She held out the book.
He dipped into the hatch and, scuffling, reappeared by the side of the miniature cityscape. He was shapeless in a baggy mauve tracksuit, the jacket zipped up to a neck corded with veins; over this he wore a wool dressing gown, the cord trailing.
‘This is second-hand. I want a new one.’ His voice was querulous. He leant on the structure and the frame creaked.
‘I found it. We save money.’
A stain ran down the man’s trouser leg. Shambling along the boundary of the streets, he left a spatter of droplets on the floorboards, smearing them with his leather slippers. Even with the skylight open, the stench of piss and solvent was strong. He opened the paperback and, licking a finger, consulted the pages.
‘There’s no airport terminal, the A13 isn’t here and you’ve scribbled on every page. What have I told you about spoiling things?’ He directed a bony forefinger at a house in a Georgian square, the curling wrought-iron balcony fashioned from fine wire and painted black. In the centre of the square were two rectangles of green washing-up scourer and between them, on a grey painted path circling a patch of moulded soil, stood a miniature ceramic figure fashioned in a running pose. ‘That house has been rebuilt since this book was printed.’ He blew at dust on the roof of the five-storey house, whiter than the others in the square.
‘They don’t put houses in the A to Z, just streets.’
He pulled at the waistband on his trousers and lurched towards the door. ‘This edition is 1995, it’s older than the one you lost.’ His voice subsided to a whine. He thrust the book at her and proceeded out to the passage.
She skimmed the atlas. The pages were marked with lines traced along the streets with a ballpoint pen. They made shapes that made her think of letters.
‘I’ll get you a new copy tomorrow,’ she called and then blurted out to the empty room: ‘I didn’t do the writing, it wasn’t me.’
He knows that.
She paused for a moment as if acknowledging the words. She noticed the drops on the floor and went after the old man.
‘Shall we change your trousers, Dad? They must be horrid.’
The man shambled off into another room along the passage without replying.
From a cupboard in the passage, she lifted out a fresh pair of pyjamas. She was too late to stop her father sitting on his bedspread, sodden trousers around his ankles. He did not help when she lifted his feet up and slid the damp material clear. It was hard to believe that the boys would end up like this.
Not all of them.
She hefted the frail man to his feet and gripped him by his tracksuit jacket to stop him falling. Her eyes averted, with the other hand she eased up his pyjamas and, holding his weight with her body, deftly knotted the cord.
Once he was propped up in bed, all tucked in with the travelling alarm clock set for his early start, she returned to her room and fetched her coat and car keys.
‘Sleep well, Dad.’ She hovered in the doorway. He was leafing through a colourful hardback book, the cover depicting young men racing in canoes. It occurred to her that his reading matter was now the same as the boys.
She was certain that no one saw her leave by the back door and get into her car.