10
King Henry’s Grammar School for Boys, April 10th, 1989
I struggled to keep it together until the end of the school day. One more lesson; Break: Lunch; two more, plus one free, in the afternoon. During my free period I sat in the empty classroom vacated by Four Upper S, and tried to make sense of what I’d seen.
Could I have imagined the boy? Could a combination of nerves and stress and the desire to finally exorcize Conrad have culminated in a full-blown hallucination? Or could it have been a practical joke, and somehow the boy had managed to hide, or maybe even leave the room during Scoones’s intervention?
I tried to familiarize myself with some of the contents of the black file, but the words were meaningless to me. I couldn’t concentrate for long enough to understand even a sentence. Shirt sleeve order must be declared by the Head in Morning Assembly. Jewish boys should assemble in 3L every second Tuesday with Rabbi Goldman. To save space, Lower School Boys will sit on the floor during Assemblies. Chapel is on Fridays, and is mandatory for all staff.
Whoever – whatever – the blond boy had been, his face kept resurfacing in my mind, and now it was beyond doubt Conrad’s face; Conrad as I remembered him; Conrad saying in my ear: He knows. He’s coming for you.
I closed the file. My throat was dry. I longed for a drink of water, but didn’t want to risk going into the Departmental Office. Scoones might be there, or Dr Sinclair. Nor did I feel like going downstairs to ask the School Secretary for the key to the disabled toilet. Instead, I went into the boys’ toilets on the Upper Corridor, feeling absurdly furtive. I told myself I was being ridiculous. It was hardly my fault that they had no women’s facilities. Besides, the boys were all in class. No one would see me going in. And still it felt wrong to be there – a woman in a man’s space – a social taboo instilled into girls from the very earliest age.
The place was austere; institutional. White tiling on the walls; steel mirrors; urinals; cubicles with black-painted doors. I noticed that the gap between the cubicle doors and the floor was unusually wide; I could see right underneath without even having to bend. The room was windowless, and the light was both dingy and strangely powerful, like the sky on a muggy day. A running tap poured a steady stream of cold water into a chipped stoneware basin.
I walked to the basin and turned off the tap. The silence yawned around me. From the plughole there came a sound; a kind of ominous gurgle. Conrad used to tell me that Mr Smallface lived in the drains. Now I knew better. I no longer heard the voices from the plughole: I no longer needed the toilet seat to be closed and held down during the night. And yet the sound unsettled me a little. It seemed to say: You’re not meant to be here. Little girl, sneaking around in the places she shouldn’t go. No one would know if you disappeared. No one would even really care.
It was a voice I knew very well, although I hadn’t heard it in years. I’d called it Mr Smallface, but I’d long since understood that it was the voice of my childhood; the voice of the Conrad-shaped hole in my world; the voice of my absent parents. My childhood loneliness and fear had taken the shape of that bugbear, the creature of nightmare teased into life by what had happened to Conrad. But I was no longer that child, that girl. I had survived. I had moved on. I was no longer broken.
I looked the plughole in the eye. It looked back at me steadily. The bar of metal halfway down looked like the eye of a grinning goat. Think you got away, Becks? the drain seemed to say in its whispering voice. Think you escaped Mr Smallface?
‘I did escape him,’ I said aloud. ‘He’s dead. He died a long time ago.’
The plughole made a gurgling sound, like a hungry child’s stomach.
‘I’m not afraid of you anymore,’ I whispered softly into the drain. ‘I’m all grown up now. I have a home. I have a daughter of my own, who knows that she is safe, and loved –’
The drain gave a dark and fruity belch, spitting foul water into my face and onto my white silk shirt.
I recoiled.
The drain gave its lopsided smile. I looked down at my wet shirt: but instead of dirty water, I saw a shocking slaughterhouse spray of red –
I took an instinctive step backward, my high heels skidding on the tiles. In the steel mirror I saw myself, open-mouthed; a bloodstained ghost. The pipe had stopped gurgling and the room was filled with my ragged breathing. The air was alive with broken shards of that sick, peculiar light. For a moment I was stunned – my eyes stung as if I’d been slapped. And then, from the drain, came a final sound; a tiny, low and hiccuping sound that could almost have been a word –
Becks.
I managed to keep it together, though. I was proud of that, at least. The last thing I wanted was for Scoones – or worse, one of the boys – to see me hysterical, covered in blood. I closed my eyes and counted to ten; forced myself to breathe again. Slowly, slowly, slowly. Then I opened my eyes again.
The blood was already almost dry; a rusty red against the silk. I stripped off my shirt, dropped it onto the tiles and slipped on my jacket over my bra. If I buttoned it all the way, I could do without the shirt. Then I went back to the sink, squirted thick green soap from a dispenser and washed the blood from my hands and face, rinsing with warm water from the tap. The drain stayed docile and quiet throughout. No blood; no sound; no whispers. I rinsed the soap ring from the basin and stepped away from the row of sinks. In the mirror I looked very pale; without my make-up I looked very young.
‘There is no Mr Smallface,’ I said.
Silence.
‘I dare you to come back,’ I said. ‘I fucking dare you to come back.’
Nothing. No buzzing, slurping sound from the drain.
‘I thought not,’ I said softly.
I bent down, picked up my shirt and bundled it into my jacket pocket. I turned towards the door – and then, behind me, from one of the stalls, I heard the sound of a toilet flush.
The gap beneath those doors was wide; far too wide for a boy to conceal his presence in the cubicle without actually standing on the toilet seat. Could a boy have been hiding in there? A mental image appeared in my mind: a blond boy wearing a Prefect’s badge, perching on the toilet seat like a crow on the side of a dustbin.
It was ridiculous. There was no boy. That was just what I’d expected to see; a kind of flashback, brought on by the stress of being here again, after all those years. The drains at King Henry’s were noisy because they were the drains of a three-hundred-year-old building: God knew what was in those pipes, or what kind of build-up had accumulated down there. The red stain on my shirt was rust. The rest was imagination.
From the empty toilet stall came a tiny knocking sound. It could have been the sound of a boy’s shoe against the toilet seat, or that of someone leaning against the locked door. Or it could have been nothing at all.
I opened the door to the corridor just as the school bell rang for lunch. I had just enough time to run back to the classroom, and to hide my discarded shirt inside the red attaché case. Then I picked up the case and made my way towards the Common Room. The Master on duty at the top of the stairs eyed me appreciatively as I passed and, glancing up, I saw him looking down at me over the railings. Presumably to check out my cleavage – of course, I wasn’t wearing my shirt.