Part 2 (1/2)

'I - I'm a part-timer,' said Meek nervously. 'I - tteach M-maths on FFridays.'

Oh dear. If I frightened him, 5F on a Friday afternoon would eat him alive. I hated to think of the mess they would make in my room. I made a mental note to be on call if there were any signs of a riot.

'b.l.o.o.d.y good place to have a pub, though,' said Light, gulping his pint. 'I could get used to this at lunchtime.'

Easy raised an eyebrow. 'Won't you be training, or supervising extracurricular, or rugby, or something?'

'We're all ent.i.tled to a lunch-break, aren't we?'

Not just a Jobsworth, but a Union man. Dear G.o.ds. That's all we need.

'Oh. But the Headmaster was - I mean, I said I'd take charge of the Geography Society. I thought everyone was supposed to do extracurricular.'

Light shrugged. 'Well, he would say that, wouldn't he? I'm telling you, there's no way I'm going to do after-school sports and weekend matches and give up my lunchtime pint as well. What is this, b.l.o.o.d.y Colditz?'

'Well, you don't have lessons to prepare, or marking--' began Easy.

'Oh, that's typical,' said Light, his face reddening. 'Typical b.l.o.o.d.y academic. Unless you've got it on paper it doesn't count, is that it? I'll tell you this for free, those lads'll get more from my lessons than they would learning the b.l.o.o.d.y capital of Khazistan, or whatever it is--'

Easy looked taken aback. Meek put his face into his lemonade and refused to come out. Miss Dare stared out of the window. Isabelle shot Light an admiring glance from beneath her smoky eyelashes.

Keane grinned. He seemed to be enjoying the fracas.

'What about you, then?' I said. 'What do you think of St Oswald's?'

He looked at me. Mid to late twenties; slim; dark-haired, with a fringe; black T-s.h.i.+rt under a dark suit. He seems very a.s.sured for such a young man, and his voice, though pleasant, has an edge of authority. 'When I was a boy I lived near here for a while. Spent a year at the local comp. Sunnybank Park. Compared to that, St Oswald's is another world.'

Well, that didn't surprise me much. Sunnybank Park eats kids alive, especially the bright ones. 'Good thing you escaped,' I said.

'Yeah.' He grinned. 'We moved down south, and I changed schools. I was lucky. Another year and that place would have finished me off. Still, move over Barry Hines; it's all good material if I ever write a book.'

Oh dear, I thought. Not a Budding Author. You get them from time to time, especially among the English staff, and though not as awkward as Union men or Jobsworths, they rarely bring anything but trouble. Robbie Roach was a poet in the days of his youth. Even Eric Sc.o.o.nes once wrote a play. Neither has ever quite recovered.

'You're a writer?' I said.

'Strictly a hobby,' said Keane.

'Yes, well -- I understand the horror genre isn't as lucrative as it used to be,' I said, with a glance at Light, who was demonstrating a biceps curl to Easy with the aid of his pint of beer.

I looked back at Keane, who had followed my gaze. At first sight, he showed potential. I hoped he wouldn't turn out to be another Roach. English teachers so often have the fatal tendency; that thwarted ambition to be something more, something other than a simple schoolmaster. It usually ends in tears, of course; escape from Alcatraz looks positively childish in comparison with escape from teaching. I looked at Keane for signs of rot; I have to say that at first sight I didn't notice any.

'I wrote a b-book once,' said Meek. 'It was called Javascript and other--'

'I read a book once,' said Light, smirking. 'Didn't think much of it, though.'

Easy laughed. He seemed to ha ve got over his initial faux pas with Light. At the next table, Jimmy grinned and moved a little closer to the group, but Easy, face half averted, managed to avoid eye contact.

'Now if you'd said the internet--' Light moved his chair a few inches, blocking Jimmy, and reached for his half finished beer. 'Plenty to read there -- if you're not afraid of going blind, know what I mean--'

Jimmy slurped his shandy, looking slightly crestfallen. He isn't as slow as some people take him for, and besides, the snub was plain enough for anyone to see. I was suddenly reminded of Anderton-Pullitt, the loner of my form, eating his sandwiches alone in the cla.s.sroom while the other boys played football in the Quad.

I shot a sideways glance at Keane, who was watching, neither approving nor disapproving, but with a gleam of appreciation in his grey eyes. He winked at me, and I smiled back, amused that the most promising of our freshers so far had turned out to be a Sunnybanker.

THE FIRST STEP IS ALWAYS THE HARDEST. I MADE MANY MORE illicit forays into St Oswald's, gaining confidence, moving closer into the grounds, the courtyards, then at last the buildings themselves. Months pa.s.sed; terms; and little by little my father's vigilance diminished.

Things had not turned out quite how he'd hoped. The teachers who called him John remained no less contemptuous than the boys who called him Snyde; the Old Gatehouse was damp in winter, and between the beer and the football and his pa.s.sion for scratchcards, there was never quite enough money. In spite of his great ideas, St Oswald's had turned out to be just another caretaker's job, filled with daily humiliations. It took up all his life. There never was time for tea on the lawn, and Mum never did come home.

Instead, my father took up with a bra.s.sy nineteen-year old called Pepsi, who ran a beauty parlour in town, wore too much lip gloss and liked to party. She had her own place, but she often stayed at ours, and in the mornings my father was heavy-eyed and short-tempered, and the house smelt of cold pizza and beer. On those days -- and others -- I knew to keep out of his way.

Sat.u.r.day nights were the worst. My father's temper was exacerbated by beer and, pockets empty after a night on the tiles, he most often chose me as the b.u.t.t of his resentment. 'Yer little b.a.s.t.a.r.d,' he would slur at me through the bedroom door. 'How do 1 know you're mine, eh? How do I know you're even mine?' And if I was foolish enough to open the door, then it would start: the pus.h.i.+ng, the shouting, the swearing, and finally the big slow roundhouse punch that, nine times out of ten, would strike the wall and send the drunkard sprawling.

I wasn't afraid of him. I had been once; but you can get used to anything in time, you know, and nowadays I paid as little attention to his rages as the inhabitants of Pompeii to the volcano that was one day to extinguish them. Most things, repeated often enough, can become routine; and mine was simply to lock the bedroom door, whatever came, and to keep well out of his way the morning after.

At first Pepsi tried to get me on her side. Sometimes she would bring me little presents, or try to make dinner, though she wasn't a great cook. But I remained stubbornly aloof. It wasn't that I disliked her -- with her false nails and overplucked eyebrows, I considered her too stupid to dislike - or even that I resented her. No, it was her dreadful palliness which offended me; the implication that she and I could have something in common, that one day perhaps, we could be friends.

It was at this point that St Oswald's became my playground. It was still officially out of bounds, but by then my father had begun to lose his initial evangelism for the place, and he was happy to turn a blind eye to my occasional infringement of the rules, so long as I was discreet and drew no attention to myself.

Even so, as far as John Snyde was concerned, I only ever played in the grounds. But the Porter's keys were carefully labelled, each in its place in the gla.s.s box behind the Gatehouse door, and as my curiosity and my obsession grew I found it harder and harder to resist the challenge.

One small theft, and the School was mine. Now no door was closed to me; pa.s.skey in hand, at weekends I roamed the deserted buildings while my father watched TV, or went down the local with his mates. As a result, by my tenth birthday I knew the School better than any pupil, and I was able to pa.s.s - invisible and unheard - without so much as raising dust.

I knew the cupboards where the cleaning equipment was kept; the medical room; the electrical points; the archives. I knew all the cla.s.srooms; the south-facing Geography rooms, unbearably hot in summer; the cool, panelled Science rooms; the creaking stairs; the odd-shaped rooms in the Bell Tower. I knew the pigeon-loft, the Chapel, the Observatory with its round gla.s.s ceiling, the tiny studies with their rows of metal cabinets. I read ghost phrases from half-cleaned blackboards. I knew the staff - at least by reputation. I opened lockers with the master key. I smelt chalk and leather and cooking and wood polish. I tried on discarded Games kit. I read forbidden books.

Better still, and more dangerous, I explored the roof. The roof of St Oswald's was a huge, sprawling thing, ridged like a brontosaurus in stony overlapping plates. It was a small city in itself, with towers and quads of its own that mirrored the towers and quads of the School below. Great chimneys, imperially crowned, soared above the crooked ridges; birds nested; rogue elders sank their roots into damp crevices and flourished improbably, dripping blossom into the cracks between the slates. There were channels and gullies and monkey-puzzle ledges leading over the rooftops; there were skylights and balconies, perilously accessible from high parapets.

At first I was cautious, remembering my clumsiness in school gymnastics. But left to my own devices I gained in confidence; learned balance; taught myself to scramble silently over smooth slates and exposed girders; learned how to use a metal rail to vault from a high ledge on to a small balcony, and there down a thick, hairy elbow of creeper into a sallow-throated chimney of ivy and moss.

I loved the roof. I loved its peppery smell; its dankness in wet weather; the rosettes of yellow lichen that bloomed and spread across the stones. Here, at last, I was free to be myself. There were maintenance ladders leading out from various openings, but these were mostly in poor condition, some of them reduced to a lethal filigree of rust and metal, and I'd always scorned them, finding my own entrances to the rooftop kingdom, unblocking windows that had been painted shut decades before, looping pieces of rope around chimney stacks to aid ascent, exploring the wells and crawl s.p.a.ces and the great leaded stone gutters. I had no fear of heights or falling. I found to my surprise that I was naturally agile; on the roof my light build was a real advantage, and up here there were no bullies to mock my skinny legs.

Of course I had long known that maintaining the roof was a job my father detested. He could just about cope with a broken slate (as long as it was accessible from a window), but the leadwork that sealed the gutters was quite another matter. To reach that, one had to crawl down a slated incline towards the far edge of the roof, where there was a stone parapet that circled the gutter, and from there, to kneel, with three hundred feet of bluegreen St Oswald's air between himself and the ground, to check the seal. He never did this necessary duty; gave a mult.i.tude of reasons for failing to do so, but after the excuses had run dry I finally, gleefully guessed the truth. John Snyde was afraid of heights.

Already, you see, secrets fascinated me. A bottle of sherry at the back of a stock-cupboard, a packet of letters in a tin box behind a panel, some magazines in a locked filing cabinet, a list of names in an old accounts book. For me, no secret was mundane; no t.i.tbit too small to escape my interest. I knew who was cheating on his wife; who suffered from nerves; who was ambitious; who read romantic novels; who used the photocopier illicitly. If knowledge is power, I owned the place.

By then I was in my last term at Abbey Road Juniors. It had not been a success. I had worked hard, kept out of trouble, but had consistently failed to make any friends. In an effort to combat my father's Northern vowels I had tried - disastrously - to imitate the voices and mannerisms of the St Oswald's boys, thereby earning myself the nickname 'Sn.o.bby Snyde'. Even some of the teachers used it; I'd heard them in their staff room, the heavy door swinging open into a fug of smoke and laughter. Sn.o.bby Snyde, pealed a woman's voice. Oh, that's priceless. Sn.o.bby Snyde.

I had no illusions that Sunnybank Park would be any better. Most of its intake was from the Abbey Road estate, a depressing block of pebble-dashed council houses and cardboard flatblocks with was.h.i.+ng at the balconies and dark stairwells that smelt of p.i.s.s. I'd lived there myself. I knew what to expect. There was a sandpit filled with nuggets of dogs.h.i.+t; a playground with swings and a lethal scattering of broken gla.s.s; walls of graffiti; gangs of boys and girls with foul mouths and grubby, inbred faces.

Their fathers drank with my father down at the Engineers'; their mothers had gone with Sharon Snyde to Cinderella's Dance-a-rama on Sat.u.r.day nights. 'You want to make an effort, kid,' my father told me. 'Give 'em a chance, and you'll soon fit in.'

But I didn't want to make the effort. I didn't want to fit in at Sunnybank Park.

'Then what do you want?'

Ah. That was the question.

Alon e in the echoing corridors of the School, I dreamed of having my name on the Honours Boards, of sharing jokes with the St Oswald's boys, of learning Latin and Greek instead of woodwork and technical drawing, of doing prep instead of homework at the big wooden desks. In eighteen months, my invisibility had changed from a talent to a curse; I longed to be seen; I strove to belong; I went out of my way to take ever greater risks in the hope that one day, perhaps, St Oswald's would recognize me and take me home. So I carved my initials alongside those of generations of Old Oswaldians on the oak panels in the Refectory. I watched weekend sports fixtures from a hiding-place at the back of the Games Pavilion. I struggled to the top of the sycamore tree in the centre of the Old Quad and made faces at the gargoyles at the edge of the roof. After school I ran back as fast as I could to St Oswald's and watched the boys as they left; heard their laughter and their complaints, spied on their fights, breathed the exhaust fumes of their parents' expensive cars as if it were incense. Our own school book room was poorly stocked, mostly with paperbacks and comics, but in St Oswald's huge cloistered library I read avidly - Ivanhoe and Great Expectations and Tom Brown's Schooldays and Gormenghast and The Arabian Nights and King Solomon's Mines. Often I smuggled books home - some of them hadn't been taken out of the library since the forties. My favourite was The Invisible Man. Walking along the corridors of St Oswald's at night, smelling the day's chalk and the bland lingerings of the kitchen, hearing the dead echoes of happy voices and watching the shadows of the trees fall on to the newly polished floors, I knew exactly, and with a deep ache of longing, how he had felt.

All I wanted, you see, was to belong. Abbey Road Juniors had been shabby and rundown, a failing tribute to sixties liberalism. But Sunnybank Park was infinitely worse. I took regular beatings for my leather briefcase (everyone that year was carrying Adidas bags); for my contempt of sports; for my smart mouth; for my love of books; for my clothes; and for the fact that my father worked at that posh school (it didn't seem to matter that he was only the caretaker). I learned to run fast and to keep my head down. 1 imagined myself an exile, set apart from the others, who would one day be called back to where I belonged. Deep down I thought that if I proved myself, somehow, if I could withstand the bullying and the petty humiliations, then St Oswald's would one day welcome me.

When I was eleven and the doctor decided I needed gla.s.ses, my father blamed my reading. But secretly I knew that I had reached another milestone on the way to St Oswald's, and although 'Sn.o.bby Snyde' quickly became 'Speccy Snyde', still I was obscurely pleased. I scrutinized myself in the bathroom mirror and decided that I almost looked the part.