The Friendly Ones. Philip Hensher
She was trying to find out where Catherine was, and Catherine called back, ‘Yes?’ from where she had removed herself to, the dining room. She had worked out that nobody came here in the mornings. It had a pleasant view out towards the woods that divided the house’s grounds from the village.
‘You won’t believe this,’ Blossom said, coming in, papers in one hand, her glasses in the other. ‘I’ve been tracking down my brother. He’s definitely in Sheffield. In the meantime, the arrangement about meeting you and poor little Josh – he’d never heard of it. But listen. When I tracked him down in Sheffield he was full of such alarming news I really think I’m going to hotfoot it up there. I could perfectly well take Josh with me.’
‘It’s not your mother, is it?’
‘It’s always Mummy,’ Blossom said briefly. ‘She’s not dying, or not imminently. Gracious heavens, what on earth have those awful children of mine been up to?’
A scene of apocalypse was approaching the house across the lawn. Their faces were smeared with mud and filth; their clothes, once party clothes, wedding uniforms, pageboy and miniature princess, were torn and smeared with earth or worse. They wore expressions of sheer joy, waving sticks that might have been meant for spears in a celebratory greeting. It was not directed at them, but at someone fifty feet to the left. Stephen must have seen them and opened the study window to call to them. Only at the back, trailing in his ordinary clothes, was there a dissentient presence; behind Thomas Josh came, his shoulders shrunk and beaten. Catherine saw with a shock that he was being pulled by the others; his wrists were bound together and he was being dragged along by a rope, or perhaps merely a thick string.
‘How adorable,’ Blossom said. ‘They’ve been playing captives, and Josh is on the losing side. He’ll be the pirate king or something. Conquered by the imperial forces, or by savage natives, one of the two. It’ll be his turn to rule and conquer next.’
‘Poor old Josh,’ Catherine said, attempting lightness in her tone. But something in the way she said it made Blossom turn to her, a half-smile of amused dismissal quickly forming. Poor old Josh, she was clearly thinking. A little bit less of that, a little bit less encouragement of Josh to stick in his ways and run from ordinary little-man savage pursuits that any child, surely, would like.
‘I have no idea,’ Blossom said, with dry amusement, ‘how – or if it’s even possible – to get mud and blood out of pale-blue velvet Faunties. I could simply kill Thomas for putting it on to romp around in the woods. They were for the Atwood wedding, those Faunties. They very sweetly asked Thomas if he’d be a pageboy.’
Across the lawn, like a cavalcade of shame, misery and death, came the children, panting, filthy and prancing. Their teeth glittered like those of carnivores, fresh from a pile of flesh and blood. They waved to the man upstairs, the father of three of them. He was yowling into the end of the morning over the lawns, lands, woods and gardens he had made the money to possess, singing his children home from a triumph, somewhere out there in the shadows of the woods.
This would have been in 1969, or maybe 1970. It was just a bag – that was all it was – and ten shillings. What was it then that kept rattling around his head years later, occupying brain cells that could have been used for preserving other facts instilled at school, how to draw a box with perspective and what the chemical symbol for beryllium was and how the passive went in German – the consequences of the playground event that kept him in dread for weeks, just sitting there like a useful lesson for survival learnt at school? It must have been 1969 or 1970, but definitely it must have been after school, because that was when
Here
Here over here
Dave it’s to me
Run and grab it there there’s a
Stuart Stuart Stuart
Grab it then it goes to Stuart that kid from Crookes is
Grab it grab it then
The kid was standing there looking at what was in his hands. It was his sports bag – a black plastic one like everyone’s, with a sports-shoe logo on the side. He looked up in rage – it was that kid Gavin who was in Mrs Tucker’s class – and pushed Leo, hard, with his bag in his fists. It was almost a punch. Leo was sweating, though it was a cold day, the air puffing into steam from their mouths even now in the late afternoon. Around them the others loosened their scarves and dropped their own sports bags.
‘You did that,’ Gavin said to Leo, pushing him again. ‘You did that. You little dwarf, you bloody did that.’
‘Sod off,’ Leo said. But Gavin was pushing his bag into Leo’s face and the others were looking concerned, grave, worried as trainee oncologists in a small circle. The bag was torn at the handle, a raw gash of cardboard under the smooth black plastic surface.
‘You bloody did that,’ Gavin said. ‘You’re going to pay for that, you dwarf.’
‘Piss off, you crater-faced TCP addict,’ Leo said. But he had done it – he had felt the handle tear under his grip as he pulled at it, hardly knowing whose bag he was tugging at. Gavin, the dour kid who always wore a shirt two days running, who sat in front of him in French and never knew the right answer, the kid with the worst acne in the year, the one they’d tried antibiotics on. He’d torn his bag.
‘It’s nothing to do with me,’ Leo said. ‘It was torn already.’
‘You did, though,’ Stuart said. ‘I saw, you know, Leo. You really tore it.’
‘Everyone was grabbing it,’ Leo said. Then he remembered why everyone had been grabbing at it – that boy Gavin, he’d taken Andy’s copy of The New Poetry. Everyone had seen him do it; it was because he hadn’t had his own copy this week and hadn’t had it last week and not the week before that. He’d lost it – Mr Batley had pointed it out and Gavin had said he’d forgotten it. And this week Mr Batley had said it again and Gavin had said it again and then at the end of class, after sharing Paul’s copy, he’d turned round and, when he thought no one was looking, he’d just picked up Andy’s copy and put it into his bag. That was why they were chasing after him and why he’d taken his bag and why it was torn now. But everyone had forgotten that, apparently. They weren’t bothered about A. Alvarez and his anthology of urgency and suffering.
‘I don’t care,’ Leo said. ‘Don’t be so pathetic.’ He went off, striding out of the school gates and up the road. It really was pathetic.
But the next day there was spotty Gavin, waiting for him when he came into the classroom, and again thrusting his bag into his face. ‘You’re going to have to pay to have that mended,’ he said. There were seven or eight kids sitting around. Of course she was there – She: she was sitting on top of a desk with her two friends and pretending not to notice that he’d come in. That was always the way in the half-hour before the register was called, kids sitting around. Gavin was right up against him, pushing his bag and his concerned, angry-red, pus-weeping face into his, leaning over him, his fists clenched. ‘You tore it. You’re going to pay to have that mended. It’s going to cost you ten shillings.’
‘I’m not paying for something I never did,’ Leo said. ‘Don’t be so pathetic. And what did you do with that book you stole from Andy yesterday?’
‘It’s you that’s pathetic,’ Gavin said. He went back to his desk.
But from the next day Leo lived in different worlds. In one, the main one, no one knew or cared about a torn bag; they had forgotten or never knew. They did not even see the way that Gavin came up to him, hissing. At home, it was as if a world of anger sat at the end of the drive outside the gates. In that other world, Gavin and he were bonded together by the vile and righteous demand, never shifting, never negotiating, just insistent on its correctness. I want that money, you dwarf, it said.