I said as much in Assembly today, but I’ll admit my thoughts were largely elsewhere. I suppose it’s natural enough. Telling my story to Straitley has opened a gateway into the past. I’m hoping it will be cathartic; that it will close that gateway for good. But until then, I am aware of a certain constraint in my movements; a certain uneasy feeling. Not that I feel at all threatened, but I will rest easier once this is done. Maybe he, too, will rest easier – not that he deserves to.
The following weeks at King Henry’s passed with little incident. There was no further sighting of the blond boy with the Prefect’s badge. I went back into the chapel twice, in the hope that my brother’s memorial might have more to offer me, but the memories released that day remained unfinished, incomplete; pieces from a puzzle from which the original picture has been lost.
The rest of the Department remained on largely cordial terms. Higgs kept his distance; Sinclair was polite; Lenormand was almost friendly. Scoones did his best to avoid me, except for my weekly progress report, which he delivered on Fridays on a single sheet of paper. He did not mention Conrad, or allude to our conversation, and I was inclined to believe that he had kept the details to himself. Occasionally, he would come into my class, always sitting at the back, to check that I was following the lesson plans set out in the Book. But after that day in the theatre, his visits became less frequent, and he never stayed more than five minutes or so, which meant that I was able to introduce more lively activities to the boys, reserving the Banda worksheets for Scoones’s occasional visits. My pupils’ behaviour improved. Even Persimmon and Spode directed their exuberance to the study of Whitmarsh.
At home, my daughter’s invisible friend continued to make his presence felt. I was not especially surprised by this. Emily was at an age where everything she overheard was stored and processed and integrated into her expanding world picture. And only children often find the presence of an invisible friend convenient in all kinds of ways. Conrad wants more ice cream. Conrad said a bad word. I didn’t break it, Conrad did. Why did she choose my brother’s name? Conrad’s story was like lint; it somehow stuck to everything. Dom, however, still believed that the reappearance of Mr Smallface was a cry for help; a sign of something more sinister.
‘She’s just being imaginative,’ I said, when he voiced his concern. ‘Did you not have invisible friends when you were her age?’
‘I had real friends,’ Dominic said. ‘Emily should have them, too.’
Dominic was always talking about the friends he’d had at school. To him, I sensed that school had been a mostly happy, carefree time: he was still in touch with friends that he had made in primary school, and his memories of those years were filled with pranks and adventures and problems shared, and the warmth of easy companionship. My own experience had been very different. Apart from Emily Jackson, I’d had no friends – not at school, or anywhere. And after Conrad disappeared, even Emily drifted away, as if I, and not he, had gone from the world. No one was unkind to me, no one bullied me, and yet there was a kind of mark on me that warned the other children away.
As I’d entered secondary school, I had tried my best to fit in. I had joined clubs and societies. I had taken up Drama and Music. I had played hockey and gone on school trips. I had been pretty, and sporty, and good. I had not been exactly unpopular; but still I’d had no close friends. It was as if the hole that was left behind when my brother had disappeared had made a space around me; a space that no one could occupy.
I shrugged. ‘You were different. Emily has always been a lot more quiet and self-sufficient.’
‘Like you,’ said Dominic. It didn’t sound like a compliment.
‘Yes, like me,’ I told him.
‘Well, maybe that’s the problem,’ he said. ‘You know, Becks, it’s sometimes possible to be too self-sufficient. It’s OK to ask for help, you know. You don’t have to deal with everything alone.’
‘I know, Dominic.’
He shrugged. ‘Doesn’t seem that way, sometimes. And you’re still talking in your sleep. Something’s wrong, and you know it.’
I waved aside his objections. It was true that my sleep had been troubled, but there had been no repetition of the sleepwalking incident, or of the sleep paralysis, or of the disturbing dream of Conrad’s voice and the green door. To be sure, I found it difficult to get off to sleep in the evenings, and I often awoke in the early hours and found myself unable to sleep again, but it was summer, and even as a child I had always been sensitive to light.
And I felt fine; more energized, more confident than I’d felt in years. I had conquered King Henry’s. I had faced the dragon and won. I had acquired immunity to the disease of my childhood. The obstacles in my way were gone, and all that was left was sunshine.
11
May 29th, 1989
Of course, that feeling didn’t last. And, of course, I was very naïve to think I could make a difference. But I was like a child in a boat on the surface of a lake: under the water, there could be any number of dangers – sink holes; currents; clutching weed; blind creatures with gaping jaws – but all the child can see is the sun shining on the water; the golden midges in the air; the ripples on the surface.
The weekend of May 29th was a Spring Bank Holiday. Dominic had booked us all a weekend away at the seaside. A guest house in Scarborough, that was all; but it would take my mind off work, he said, and give us the chance to spend some time together, before the rush of activity that heralded the School exams.
‘Emily’ll love it,’ he said. ‘It’s where we always used to go when we were kids.’
I remember that weekend; sunny, and filled with families making the most of the sunshine. I remember being unsurprised that Dominic had loved it here; the games arcades; the ice-cream stands; he and his sisters on the beach, building sandcastles and playing games. Emily loved it, too: she and I had never been on holiday together. But then, I’d only ever been on holiday once, with my parents; a time I remembered only through my parents, and a single photograph. Myself, aged three, and Conrad; on a nameless beach in France, laughing into the camera. It was one of the photographs my parents kept on the mantelpiece. They often spoke of that holiday. But I had no memories of my own. Any that I might have had were overwritten by stories of Conrad; stories I’d heard so often that they had become my reality. The time that Conrad had given me his ice cream when I’d dropped my own. The time that Conrad had saved me when a big wave had knocked me down. And the sandcastle in the picture, which he had spent all day building for me. It was my first and last holiday. After Conrad disappeared, we had always stayed at home, even during the long summer holidays. Without the Jacksons and Emily, I would have been completely alone: alone with the ghost of Conrad.
Perhaps all this was why I did not warm to the idea of a seaside holiday as much as I had expected. The beach was too crowded, the water too cold; in May, the sun is deceptively warm, but the sea still remembers winter. But yes, I was convincing. Dominic’s photographs proved it – hundreds of them, taken on the promenade, the beach, the tiny garden that ran alongside the stucco-fronted boarding house. Photos of me with Emily, flying a kite by the seashore; or building a castle, or on the street, or paddling in the cold sea. They look so real, those memories; and yet they were a performance. Emily, too, knew how to perform; posing for the camera; indulging in the kind of kittenish, pre-sexual behaviour a young girl may sometimes adopt when a man she loves is watching. I was not fooled. It was pretence, just as her antics with ‘Conrad’ had been a kind of performance, designed to divert attention away from the fear of the monster.