It was the boy of my first day, the blond boy with the Prefect’s badge. He looked at me, crazed in the coloured light of my brother’s memorial window, and grinned at me, as if to say: How much do you love me, Becks?
And at that, clapping a hand to my mouth, I ran from King Henry’s Chapel, just as the final line of the hymn rang out into the gilded air.
7
King Henry’s Grammar School for Boys, April 28th, 1989
Eric Scoones had been watching me. He must have seen how upset I was. He caught up with me in the passageway that led to the main school building – a passageway lined with memorials to boys and Masters dead in the War. The passageway was filled with light; it was like being in a fish tank. I put my hand against the wall to steady myself. My head was buzzing with nausea.
There was no boy. There was no boy. And yet I had seen him clearly; under my brother’s memorial –
‘Miss Price. Are you feeling unwell?’
Scoones was looking rigid and pinched. He looked like a man who is forced to touch a wasp’s nest, or a dying dog. I wondered how much it had cost him to come after me in the first place, to try for that semblance of sympathy. All in the name of duty, of course; Scoones was a stickler for that.
I said, ‘It must have been the heat. I’ll be all right in a minute.’
He made a kind of huffing sound. I realized his anxiety was less to do with concern for me, and was entirely due to the fear that he might find himself having to deal with an unconscious woman in a narrow corridor just as a thousand boys emerged from chapel on a Friday.
Nervously, he cleared his throat. ‘Maybe you should see the School Nurse.’
I shook my head. ‘I’ll be all right. All I need is a minute.’ I closed my eyes again, although I no longer felt dizzy. Instead, I felt a kind of glee. The bully was afraid. What of? My femininity; my essential alienness in this masculine place. From the chapel I heard the sound of a thousand schoolboys standing up. It must be almost time, I thought. I could feel their eagerness, their restlessness to be up and away.
I opened my eyes and said to Scoones, with a touch of malice: ‘I must be starting my period. Sometimes I have fainting spells – and I have a heavy flow.’
Scoones’s face had changed colour. His usually pink complexion had veered to Banda-ink purple. ‘Let’s get you to the nurse,’ he huffed, and taking me by the elbow, began almost to drag me down the passageway. His alarm was tangible; his hand clenched the fabric of my sleeve. I really think he might have swooned if he’d accidentally touched my skin. I followed, smiling a little, hearing the muffled sound of the Head giving his valediction.
And then the boys came rushing out, just as Scoones and I turned the corner into the Middle Corridor, which led to the Little Theatre.
‘You can sit in there,’ said Scoones, manoeuvring me through the double doors, away from the stream of schoolboys. ‘Just sit in one of the seats and breathe. I’ll go and fetch the School Nurse.’
‘No, please, don’t,’ I said. ‘I’m sure I’ll be fine in a minute.’
Scoones seemed rather put out at this; clearly, his intention had been to leave me in the care of a woman as quickly as he could. The malice that had led me to simulate a fainting fit returned, along with the germ of an idea. I thought of those bits of graffiti I’d seen on desks up and down the school. Mr Scoones is the Eggman. Mr Scoones is a nonce. School graffiti is mystic, I thought. It dares to dance and caper around a truth that cannot be spoken.
I sat down heavily on one of the upholstered theatre seats and put my hand to my temple. Scoones lingered at the door, eyes fixed on the passageway.
The scent of the Little Theatre, a compound of sawdust and velvet and paint, settled all around me. The light from the stained-glass ceiling dome fell like autumn leaves upon the rows of red-velvet theatre seats and the stage, with its painted safety curtain. It all felt very familiar. Had I been here once before? Perhaps on the day Conrad disappeared? I could feel the buried memory waiting to reveal itself. But try as I might, I could not bring it out of the sink hole.
‘I really think the nurse –’ said Scoones.
‘Really, no.’ I looked up at him. ‘I’ll be all right in a minute, but seeing that stained-glass window –’
‘Window?’ said Scoones, with another of those desperate glances down the passageway.
‘The memorial window to Conrad Price.’
I thought I saw him flinch. ‘Price?’
‘The boy who disappeared,’ I said. ‘The boy who was murdered. My brother.’
8
King Henry’s Grammar School for Boys, April 28th, 1989
In spite of all my caution, Roy, I am a creature of impulse. It’s one of the reasons, after all, that I chose to tell you this story. It’s also why I decided then to push a little further. It wasn’t that I really suspected him of anything. But Scoones had been so hostile to me when I arrived at King Henry’s that the thought of making him feel a little discomfort of his own was almost irresistible. And whether it was Conrad’s name, or the unwanted intimacy, or the thought of menstruation, but for a moment I thought the man was going to have a heart attack. His face had turned the delicate shade of a Banda sheet nearing the end of its life, and his stiffness was almost painful.
‘You couldn’t have known Conrad,’ I said. ‘You weren’t even a teacher here then. Were you, Mr Scoones?’
‘I was at St Oswald’s,’ he said. ‘It was only my second year as a Junior Master.’
I tried to imagine Eric Scoones as a Junior Master, and found that I could not. That reddish face, the greying hair must have been with him since childhood. And that stiffness that seemed part of him, like the spine of a particularly dull book, must have been with him then, too. I couldn’t imagine him differently. I suspect he never was.
‘I was only five years old,’ I said. ‘But losing him changed everything. Nothing has been normal since then. Whoever took my brother that day took my parents, my childhood. My life.’ I kept my eyes on his face, and went on in a toneless, quiet voice; ‘I still sometimes dream of meeting them. Whoever it was who took Conrad away – I’d like to look into their eyes and tell them what they did to me, to my parents, to everyone. Taking a child out of the world is like taking a supporting block out of a game of Jenga. Everything destabilizes. Everything comes falling down. That’s what you did, I’d tell them. That’s what you did to all of us.’
Scoones was very pale by now. The purplish cast to his features had faded to a washed-out mauve. His eyes, which always seemed to weep, now seemed more watery than ever. He opened his mouth, but nothing came out but a kind of stifled moan.
‘Are you all right, Mr Scoones?’ I said. ‘You’re looking awfully pale.’
Scoones gave a furtive glance sideways into the corridor. I hid a smile, like a gleeful child who has outwitted a bully. And then his expression changed to one of sudden and desperate relief. ‘Miss Macleod,’ he said in a voice that wavered like a schoolboy’s. ‘I’m afraid Miss Price is feeling unwell.’